It's been a very busy first 6 months of 2010, with much of my time focused on doing "other" things critical for my job, and to the center/agency programs. Unfortunately these time consuming activities have considerably slowed my ability to push some of the lab science forward. It didn't help that the post doc I had who was working on the genomics project left to take an internship with another government agency. This was good for him and important for his future aspirations, it paid him considerably more, and I felt I really had to encourage him to take it. But it sure caused a loss of momentum, and with the time commitment needed for his internship, I don't see him writing up one of his two projects unless I try to draft it.
However, unless I am requested to provide research support for a microbial perspective on seafood safety or ecological damage assessments as a result of the Gulf of Mexico Transoceanic oil spill disaster, things should start heating up this summer. I have a new post doc coming in July who will drive the genomics work. A couple of months ago he spent 4 weeks in the lab on an internship (funded through one of the national programs that my program is a part of), and I was both impressed and relieved that he will prove to be one of the better ones.
Everything's in place, financially and organizationally, to have 10-16 strains of my favorite bacterial species sequenced to ~100x coverage on a SOLiD next gen sequencer (when do they become current gen?). Strains to be sequenced have already been subjected to MLST analysis, clonal groups characterized and relationships established. The objectives include determining what is different at the genome level between clinical (therefore virulent) strains, which form one tight clonal complex and appear rare in the environment, and other environmental isolates that belong to other phylogenetic groups and are not isolated from clinical cases.
This should be fun, and I do need some of that at work!
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