Farncombe
Phage

The stars align: today I have a (long ago planned) guest lecture on technologies developed using phages, and the Nobel Committee announces the Laureates in Chemistry; Frances H Arnold, Sir Gregory P Winter & George P Smith - the latter two for their work on Phage Display. The list of phage nobel laureates keeps getting bigger!

The lack of updates is a product of Dr. Hynes’s sleep-deprived parental leave, but the lab is still doing great things! Today, Hiba presented her work to the Farncombe Institute, engaging an audience from a wide variety of backgrounds. Great job!

Today marks the publication of the first paper to come out of the group... sort of. While the wet-work was carried out as part of my Postdoc, the data analysis was all here at McMaster - so it counts! Read the full article (open source) in Nature Communications here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05092-w

I'd like to think that our failure to escape has more to do with how thorough, innovative and imaginative we are, rather than any failure of intellect. I'd like to think that...

Sara hosted a joint Stearns/Hynes lab BBQ at her new place, and everyone pitched in for a fantastic evening - a lovely way to wind down after a long day of scrubbing up the lab. 

We embarked on our first biannual lab cleanup. Everyone on their hands and knees, scrubbing, inventorying (is that a verb?), calibrating... The lab provided pizza, the students provided the elbow grease. Thank you to everyone for your hard work!

Lab meeting proceeded in the absence of both myself and Jen last week. Here are the fruits of that meeting - I'm impressed. How come students are all so much more talented than their supervisor?

Félix and Hiba joined me on my annual pilgrimage to the CSM, this year hosted in Manitoba. Hiba is now the first student to have presented work from the lab at a conference, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel making the switch from presenter to observer... but Hiba did such a great job, she made the transition easy. Great work, Hiba!

My first opportunity to present data from the lab - and it couldn't have happened at a more impressive conference. Craig McCormick and Nathalie Grandvaux got the society up and running *and* hosted a phenomenal ~175 person inaugural CSV meeting. 

With a new cohort of recruits comes a new phage boot camp - most of a week learning the basics of phage visualizing, handling, storage, preservation, etc. This time, we were also joined by students from the Burrows, Surette and Hosseini-Doust labs.  Everyone in this picture was told to look busy.