Monday, July 16, 2012

Take a chance on me..., Cyanobacteria ecology & Web site updates

Hi Friends:

The last couple of weeks I have been immersed in a new project, which is about bet hedging in yeast. It all started with a very exciting paper I read by Levy et al:
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001325
There is a tremendous amount of data in that paper, but the most interesting findings (from my perspective) is that they see a correlation between age, growth rate and stress resistance. The idea they put forward is that old cells are best candidates for being stress resistant persistors, because they contribute relatively less to the population growth anyway. I am working on developing a model to investigate this question. This is one of the most joyful times for me, when I learn about a new problem, read up on the literature, start coding the model, etc... I feel like I am back in graduate school.

Our summer Charles River work has started again. This year, PhD student Xiaodan Ruan, RETs Judy Luber-Narod and Jalal Ghaemghami, and YSPs Nicholas King and Jackie Ly will be focusing on understanding the ecology of toxic cyanobacteria in the river. Last year’s research was hampered a bit because we did not get a significant bloom. This year we already had a big bloom and temperatures are high, so we expect to get more (bad for the river, good for research).

Some updates on my web page: As you can see on my homepage (www.systemsbioecology.org), I make use of other sites to host my stuff. For example, I have a YouTube channel for all my videos, and my blog is here at Blogspot. I have found this strategy to be quite useful, and I now also started using Dropbox to host my files for Talks, CV and Models.

Best regards,
Ferdi