Tomasz has recently joined our lab as a Postdoctoral fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. in Genetics at TAMU with a dissertation on “Comparative genomic analysis of economic traits related genes in Southern pines”. Tomasz familiarity with both pine tree genetics and computer programming will be instrumental to our lab goal of achieving a better understanding of the origin and function of conifer genes
Earlier this week I visited Columbia and the very nice University of Missouri campus for the first time. It’s probably the best time of the year to be in the midwest, as the stunning foliage colors welcome you in the Francis Quadrangle. They also have some real Ginkgo trees up there (see photo)!
I have to thank my colleague and friend Dr. Gavin Conant for the invitation, which gave me the chance to meet with some outstanding faculty from MU (Drs. Chris Pires and Jared Decker) and with Dr. Laura Kubatko from Ohio State University, who was also visiting and gave an impressive lecture on Species Tree Estimation. The seminar on Dryad elements in conifers went pretty well too. There will be a post on the topic following a paper on the topic, hopefully very soon..
This week Nature features the analysis of the white-checked gibbbon (Nomascus leucygenus) genome led by Lucia Carbone at the Oregon Health & Science University, with a nice picture of the baby gibbon ‘Pepper’ on the cover. Last July the analysis of the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) genome has been published in Nature Genetics. I have been involved in both papers looking for gene duplication and gene loss events in these two new primate genomes. A nice outline of this researches and my specific contribution has appeared on AgriLife today.
Picture credit: Nature
Xuan is a PhD student in the MEPS program. She has joined the lab this summer and has been key in making everything working properly. After helping cleaning up a lot of ‘vintage’ equipment and setting up new instruments, Xuan has begun working on what happens to be the coolest project in the lab by virtue of being the only project involving actual experiments. She is also learning how to program in python, a savvy decision considering that PCRs often don’t work. Except today, but that’s for another post..
Setting up a molecular biology lab is never easy. Luckily, there’s no scarcity of help from colleagues and staff members working in other labs. Things are even smoother when there is a stock room down the street. This morning I bought a few basic items from the Biochemistry stock room, mainly to ‘test the system’ and check out what’s stocked and available right away. Yes, there is no actual reagent yet except agarose, hidden somewhere in the pic; hey, Rome hasn’t been built in a day, has it?!
The Ecology & Evolutionary program is a fantastic interdisciplinary group at A&M that will officially kick-off as a graduate program very soon (link).
This summer the EEB program offered for the first time the ‘Open Source for Open Science’ workshop, a free summer workshop featuring an introduction to R, *nix commands, and open source GIS (link). The workshop was a success, with more than 80 (!) participants. I taught the *nix (Unix-based systems, such as Linux) commands session, which was a great teaching experience and an excellent way to expand my *nix commands toolkit. Special thanks to Rebecca Clark, postdoc in Spencer Behmer lab, and to my wife Michelle Lawing, also an ESSM faculty (link), for organizing this workshop!
Updating lab events can be quite slow.. Last May 16th I gave a talk on Gene Conversion in Eukaryotes at the 2nd Annual Symposium on Big Data in Biology (BDiB) in Austin.
Hans Hofman, director of the UT Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, his student Ryana Harris and other folks at UT did a great job in organizing this one day-long, very lively meeting. Lots of great talks and posters. I surely hope to attend next year BDiB!
I presented part of my research plan last week at the Western Gulf Forest Tree Improvement Program (WGFTIP; http://texasforestservice.tamu.edu/main/article.aspx?id=1687) Contact Representatives Meeting in Jasper, TX. My seminar was titled: “How Forest Genomics at Texas A&M can Impact the Breeding Program”.
It was a great opportunity to hear about ongoing research in Silviculture, Entomology, Forest Health, Breeding Programs in pine trees and other forest trees, and to meet researchers, operators and industry representatives from most states of the Southeastern U.S.
Best of all, we visited the Evans Seed Orchard near Deridder, LA, owned by the International Forest Company (http://www.interforestry.com/), and toured the Container Tree Seedlings facility that produces more than 30 million seedlings every year! Check out the impressive outdoor nursery of loblolly and longleaf pine trees with automatic irrigation in this panoramic view, and the longleaf seedlings in their containers.
