This [...]]]> We bid farewell last weekend to our lab visitor, Nastassa Gioti, who is headed back to Sweden after 6 fun weeks in Riverside.  We learned from her, and she got to dig into her genome datasets for Neurospora in the context of the comparative and genome annotation tools we have, so it was fun all around!

This also marked the second get together (but the first where we remembered to bring a camera). Since we gathered at a local mexican restaurant with whimsical and amazing sculptures and art from recycled material, it was fitting we document it with pictures.

A few papers have come out or are now accepted. One I’ll highlight here is the publication of the Sordaria macrospora genome.  This was a fun collaboration with [...]]]> Spring is flying along. We’ve been presenting some of our work at conferences and getting ready for a full summer of meetings and Divya preparing for her qualifying exam.

A few papers have come out or are now accepted. One I’ll highlight here is the publication of the Sordaria macrospora genome.  This was a fun collaboration with groups in Germany, France, Oregon State, and Edinburgh where we sequenced Sordaria with 454 and Illumina sequence and assembled the genome using de novo assembler and comparative scaffolding to the available Neurospora genomes.  Sordaria is an important model system for sexual development and provides a great evolutionary not-too-distant outgroup to the Neurospora clade for evolutionary genomic analyses we are trying to finish off.

Also have had a chance to interact with colleagues at the JGI User meeting, the Neurospora conference, and a special treat of speaking at the PBoFF symposium at Texas A&M.

Everyone is getting their projects underway in the lab and we’ve had two visitors come to work on Neurospora and Chytrid genome project analyses so a busy but exciting time for us.

Several more weeks left in the quarter where I’m teaching introductory biology and  then the Gordon Conference, MSA, and IMC9 will be conferences to finish preparing for.  The lab will also be represented at Evolution meetings in Portland as John attending.

The work highlights the important aspect of how pathogenicity factors can be exchanged via mobile chromosomes and can be an important pathway for adaptive evolution and acquisition [...]]]> Congrats to graduate student Divya Sain a co-author on a paper published in Nature on mobile chromosomes in Fusarium, stemming from her work her work during a rotation in the Borkovich laboratory.

The work highlights the important aspect of how pathogenicity factors can be exchanged via mobile chromosomes and can be an important pathway for adaptive evolution and acquisition of new function through whole chromosome exchange between strains.

Chris Fields and I spoke about BioPerl past and present and tried to convince computer science types that biology is in fact interesting on TWiT.tv FLOSS. Check out the podcast for [...]]]>  

Chris Fields and I spoke about BioPerl past and present and tried to convince computer science types that biology is in fact interesting on TWiT.tv FLOSS. Check out the podcast for Episode 96.

Wordle for [...]]]> Making some signs for the doors to offices.  Here’s a Wordle plot from abstracts of last 7 years of papers. Tip the hat to M. Dunham for the idea to make it part of the lab signs.

Wordle for StajichLab (2009)