Lab news for January

A quick January update.  Jason was appointed to a two year term as Councilor for Genetics/Molecular Biology for the Mycological Society of America, began a term on the editorial board of Eukaryotic Cell, and was also profiled in the GSA reporter. Finishing grants and working towards completing manuscripts from postdoc-land while we are computing results on from genome and RNA-Seq datasets. Working to getting our laboratory production up and running to generate more of our data.Currently the lab is four strong with 3 graduate students. They are Divya Sain and Yi (Zoe) Zhou who have joined for the long haul of doing a PhD in the GGB program, and Yizhou Wang, a rotation student from Plant Biology.  Divya is working on a project that uses bioinformatics and phylogenetics to reconstruct history of the genes involved in the fungal cell wall across the fungi.  Zoe is using bioinformatics and phylogenetics to focus on duplicated gene evolution and is exploring other aspects of duplication in fungal genomes.  Yizhou will be getting going in the laboratory learning how to grow Neurospora and preparing some RNA extractions for some transcriptomics and RT-PCR validation.In February John Abramyan will join us as a postdoctoral scholar to work on some molecular biology and genomics work on at least two fungi along with applying  bioinformatic analyses of these data.I also setup the Gbrowse2 for Sordaria and Coprinopsis, worked on some new template themes for the blogs, and we setup a bioinformatics group website at UCR (which is still coming together). Hoping the rest of Jan and Feb will be clearing a few more to do things off the list and getting a chance to do a bit more research blogging on the Hyphal Tip.