Another two-month gap - I really don't know why I haven't been blogging. (Probably something to do with the massive preparations for my online Useful Genetics course at Coursera (RRTeaching update here).

The RA has done a fabulous job on her purine-regulation paper.  She designed and carried out the experiments and wrote the paper with only minimal input from me, sent it first to Nucleic Acids Research, and when they bounced it back sent it right off to Molecular Microbiology.  They provisionally accepted it, with only minor revisions (no new experiments), and she sent the revised version back to them within a few days.

Our NSERC grant proposal was successful, which is nice.  It wasn't rated very high so we have only a small amount of money, but it's for five years.  We still have quite a bit of money from our former CIHR grant (continuing under an automatic no-cost extension) so even if my next CIHR proposal fails we'll still have money to run the lab and support at least one grad student.  The RA will be leaving us soon, but fortunately for everyone she has a great new position in the new building across the street.

For this next CIHR proposal (due Sept. 15) I'm going to go back to our strength in regulation. Several areas need to be investigated.  One is the purine regulation - the RA made a start into probing the biochemistry, but this needs to be taken further.  She's also getting some new results on how CRP and Sxy interact.  And there's the long-standing puzzle of how mutations in murE hyper-activate the competence regulon.