Preparing talks

I've been struggling to pull together ideas and data for the two talks I'm giving (next week and the week after) at evolution meetings.  Yesterday was my turn to give lab meeting, and I used it to get help from the post-docs.  My draft talks were a mess, but the post-docs had lots of excellent suggestions.  Both talks will use the same introduction to the evolutionary significance of bacterial DNA uptake, and will then diverge. 

On the USS-evolution simulation front, the model is running nicely and I'm using it to quickly collect data for my first talk (20 minutes, for the Sex and Recombination meeting).  But I have to compromise statistical significance with run time, as the large genomes needed to get lots of sequence data take a long time to simulate.  

On the proteome-evolution front, my bioinformatics collaborator just sent me the last of the data, including a control set needed for comparison with the analysis of how divergent USS-encoded peptides are to their homologs.