On other research fronts...

The postdoc and I continue to work on his DNA uptake specificity manuscript, temporarily distracted by (1) the need to prepare a poster for the Gordon Conference on Microbial Population Biology, which I'll be attending next week (no tweets or live-blogging, by conference policy); and (2) the belated arrival of the sequencing output for the 88 recombinant clones he submitted to the Genome Sciences Centre 8 months ago.

I've also repeated the controls for my phage recombination experiments.  This time they worked well, and I realized that 'infectious centers' are not a good way to estimate recombination.

The Research Associate has me doing competence assays on the collection of knockout mutants she's generating.  I can do these much more efficiently than anyone else in the lab - I've done 12 in the past week.