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
