I'm finally testing a hfq mutant

The RA's gone off on a short but well-earned trip to the sun, and before she left she made the H. influenzae hfq knockout I've been waiting for.  So yesterday, after clicking 'Submit' on our NSERC grant proposal, I did competence time courses of wildtype cells and the mutant, hoping to see a difference in transformation frequencies (preferably a decrease).

You can read all the background in this post from last March.  And here's a hexameric structure for Hfq (from Wikipedia):

The colonies are still too tiny to count, but it looks like the transformation frequency is down about 10-fold in the mutant!

Next step, make some DNA from the mutant so I can introduce the mutation into my hypercompetent mutant backgrounds.