Sunshine and benchwork = bliss?

I'm back...  (I don't know why I haven't been posting while I've been grant-writing.)

Anyway, to start off easy, here's today's weather forecast:

Nothing but sunshine for the next week.  (Normally most days in October are rainy.)  And nothing but sunshine for the past 2 months and more!  Since July 24 Vancouver has had a total of only 8 mm of rain (normal is more than 100 mm).  Anywhere else people would be worrying about the drought, and about climate change, but here we're just glorying in all the sunshine.

Two grant proposals have been submitted.  You can get the CIHR one on the 'What we're planning' page of our website (link in the left sidebar); the CFC one will appear there soon.  The first is a big one to CIHR (Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Canada's NIH), proposing to develop the information base and algorithm needed to predict transformational recombination in the respiratory tract.  The second is a smaller one to Cystic Fibrosis Canada, proposing to use H. influenzae's ability to extract H. influenzae DNA from complex mixtures as a tool to characterize H. influenzae populations in respiratory tract samples from children with cystic fibrosis.  The post-doc (blessed be his name) wrote this one, with minimal input from me.

A draft of a third proposal, to NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada's NSF) has been passed on to UBC's internal-review system.  It proposes to test the hypothesis that the self-biased uptake systems of the Pasteurellaceae and Neisseria species are due to mechanistic biases in the uptake process rather than to selection for optimal recombination, by looking for similar biases in bacteria that don't preferentially take up their own DNA. The final proposal doesn't need to be submitted until the end of the month.

So I might have time to do an experiment or two.   I'll have to ask the Research Associate what I should do.