Farncombe
Phage

It’s one of my favourite days of the year - and we had 7 people from the lab presenting their work (6 shown, because 7 makes a lousy picture). Not only that, but Rabia (a month into her MSc) won runner-up for best Master’s poster, and Janice (a month into her Thesis) won first place for best undergraduate poster presentation! What a fantastic team, making me look good in front of all my colleagues…

It’s exciting… and terrifying. The lab is still growing rapidly (although hopefully not exponentially!), and as of this Monday, at 15 people. Getting us all in the same place at the same time is proving impossible, so one, Kevin, will be added in post.

There’s no way I could manage this logistically if these people weren’t exceptional, resourceful, independent and doing most of the intellectually heavy lifting for me!

Yesterday, two of the group got trained on this remarkable machine that just recently made its home in the CMCB. I wasn’t anywhere near, and I’m still bouncing from excitement at some of the new ‘toys’ we get to play with in the coming weeks.

It’s hard work and elbow grease, but absolutely worthwhile - especially if you want to get bacteriology labs to trust a phage lab! Our thrice-a-year lab cleanup day has the place looking as good as the day we moved in. Better, actually, by a considerable margin. And compared to last week? Well, you’ve only to scroll back to the last blog post to see it’s night and day.

With every incoming wave of students (5 this September) comes another 3 day intensive boot camp, bringing them up to speed on basic phage manipulation. And the students do look intense! This picture also gets to serve as a “before” picture, in anticipation of our big lab cleanup on Monday.

Last time we tried our hand at an escape room, I was present, and we failed miserably. This time, they went back to the same place (different scenario), and aced it. Without me. Clearly, I’m just holding my grad students back!

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing - and this is not a picture of the lunar lander, but a rather nice shot of a podovirus (P68). While I don’t think this is an actual example of biomimicry, it’s a pretty remarkable convergence.

Photo used with permission of the Félix D’Hérelle Reference Center for Bacterial Viruses, credit Dr. Hans W. Ackermann.

I think when even our shaking incubator is filled to the brim with overflow plates, my students sending me this picture might, just might be hinting at suggesting I buy another incubator.

At Rabia’s initiative, we followed up lab meeting with board games (and snacks!). We flubbed a round of Mysterium (pictured), and wrapped up with quite a few games of Spyfall. The conclusion; we should never trust my instincts for anything, and Rabia is inherently suspicious. Or I guess, that I’m inherently suspicious of Rabia? I don’t know what that says about me, but it can’t be good…

CRISPR2019 - I was back to my old stomping grounds, with Sylvain (and Karen & Alan, whom I am hiding behind in this picture) hosting the always impressive CRISPR conference. It’s always both awesome (in the original sense of the word) and humbling to see the work coming out of the labs of some of these luminaries.