Bigelow OCB Meeting Report

I am at Bigelow Lab in Boothbay Harbor, Maine for a workshop on single cell analysis for marine plankton. This is a very exciting area where novel observational technologies are rapidly growing the gap between observations and modeling. There simply is no correlation between our conventional/operational models and modern data. Today I learned something new. I was already aware of the high phenotypic heterogeneity we see in clonal cultures, but single cell genomics are now revealing a high degree of genomic heterogeneity in clonal populations as well! Is this variability neutral? What is the ecological role? How do we model it? Workshop link: http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=133296

… and now my wife is coming up and we will go on to Acadia National Park for some hiking and camping. Visiting this park has been a goal of mine since 2004, and now we are finally doing it. This blog is for professional topics only, so this trip must therefore be hereby marked "sampling" solely to indicate this fact.