Other tasks for the soon-to-be-departing Co-op tech

The Co-op tech will be leaving us at the end of the month.  Last week she gave an excellent bab meeting presentation, and this revealed a couple of loose ends and interesting possibilities that should be cleared up before she leaves.

First, she and the sabbatical visitor (now back home in Regina) isolated a new mutation in rpoD that causes hypercompetence.  But this strain hasn't yet been added to our formal collection of frozen strains and the associated 'Strain List' database.  This is essential and urgent.

Second, the mutant hunt turned up a couple of other 'possibly hypercompetent' mutants whose phenotypes haven't been checked out.  These need to be checked in competence time courses, and added to the Strain List collection if they turn out to be genuinely hypercompetent.

A weird result that I'd forgotten about is the finding that cells transformed with a mixture of NovR and KanR DNA fragments (generated by PCR) showed a much LOWER cotransformation frequency than expected.  We suspect this reflects some chromosome-level interaction between these linked segments, but we'd first need to reproduce the result.