Classes are over!

Yesterday was the last lecture for my pilot genetics course, so now I can turn my attention (some of it, there's still the final) to research-related stuff.

Next week I'm giving two talks at the University of Louisville (Kentucky).  One will be on competence (Do bacteria have sex?); I'll show my stop-motion animation of DNA uptake and work in the new results on recombination tracts and uptake specificity.  The other is titled 'What I learned from #arseniclife: communication and quality control in science'.  I've not formally talked about this before, so I still have to sort out what I did learn.

The post-doc's paper on recombination tracts has been provisionally accepted by PLoS Pathogens, and he's working on the revisions.  One highlight was a reviewer who wrote "I wished for death" but nevertheless recognized the value of our meticulously detailed description of the control analyses.

Maybe if I go stand in front of my bench I'll be able to remember what I was working on before classes started...