What should our 'senior' co-op tech do next?

We have two co-op (undergraduate) technicians at present (paid from the last of our leftover CIHR funds).  Each is with us for 8 months; one started in May and the other in September, so there's a 4 month overlap.

The senior one has done almost all of the work preparing the samples for the RNA-seq project, and lately she's also been doing competence time courses to characterize the phenotype of our hypercompetent rpoD mutant.  She's looked at growth conditions, at the effects of added cAMP (competence up) and added AMP (competence down), and the effects of knocking out the small-RNA regulator Hfq (down).  Writing this post makes me realize that we haven't summarized her results anywhere, so I'll sit down with her and pull it all together this morning (I think that will be another post).

Now we need to decide whether there are still more rpoD phenotype assays she should do, or whether she should move on to another project for her last two months.  Since I hypothesize that the rpoD mutation causes competence by slowing sxy transcription and increasing its mRNA translatability, she could assay the effects of of the rpoD mutation in combination with our various sxy mutations that affect its mRNA translatability.  But this would be very much a fishing expedition, lots of work but probably no new insights (because it's not testing any specific hypotheses).

Hmmm, looking back, I discover that I've never written a blog post clearly explaining the general hypothesis about how the rpoD mutation causes hypercompetence.  I think it's time I did that.