Farncombe
Phage

With Félix back in town for a friend’s defence yesterday, we took advantage of the opportunity to gather and celebrate his paper (out in mSphere last week). We have done Lunches, Suppers… Snacks, but never Breakfast’s before. I guess next is midnight snack? As an additional treat, Gayatri dropped by, and we got to hear all about her little one.

It was a great day for the Hynes lab. In my bike ride to the annual Farncombe Research Day at the Beautiful Botanical gardens, I managed to make it up that insane hill without dismounting. A group published a paper that builds on our work and really inspired me. Ayesha (pictured) gave a great talk closing off the morning session, with an entirely new pitch I am definitely going to steal. Gayatri and Rabia were recognized for their leadership and contributions to the Farncombe (click through for picture), and Rabia picked up an award for her poster too! Oh, not to mention all the great science on display I got to ask questions about…

The lab’s longest-running story, I thought it was one good experiment from ready about 8 months into the lab’s tenure… but this one was a lesson in the importance of readily falsifiable hypotheses. We had one we liked so much - it fit perfectly. We knew eDNA mattered. We knew it had to be phage eDNA… but we were convinced that meant it had to serve as the source of the immunological memory (the spacers). It was only through flipping the story on its head and genuinely assuming we were wrong that Felix was able to wrap this one up, and so today’s publication feels like a particularly momentous one - great science, disseminated, but also an important lesson for this particular PI…

While I celebrated labour day by grant writing, Gayatri was busy celebrating the day by… going into labour. Welcome to the world, little one, and congratulations Gayatri! Pretty much guaranteed to be the lab’s biggest news of the year. Oh, at it might be worth noting that she also got an award for best talk (in absentia) for her RIP talk in last year’s series. I imagine that’s not high on her list of memorable things about the week though…

A little lab cleanup, with some new and returning faces. It’s the start-of-semester tradition that gets us off on the right foot, followed by - of course - boot camp over the next three days.

This shot, as you can probably tell, did not take place today. Rabia’s June Convocation was my third opportunity to hood a PhD graduate (second day wearing the Wizard Robes) - but I’ve been waiting for these pictures for a while, and finally get to show them off - there’s another one after the jump. Belated online congratulations to Dr. Fatima!

I rarely show data in the pictures on this site… but this one speaks for itself. Well, I’ll still speak to it, though - Rabia’s latestpaper (today in mBio - click HERE) is, in part, the answer to the “yeah, but do you really think it’ll work in vivo?” question we get after every talk. But it’s more than that - it’s mechanistic insight, and raises a few really interesting questions about Phage Therapy that… well, suffice it to say they’re the subject of a grant I’m writing right now.

Gayatri’s gone, in preparation for another adventure. You might even be able to tell what it is from the picture, at this point. She’ll be back, of course, with reinforcements. We’re all excited for her, and it does create a very odd swap - as Christine returns from Mat leave in 2 weeks. That’s continuity-ish, that is!

He first held his pipette in the Hynes lab - and now, as of today, he’s a Master of Science! Let’s be real, he had mastered his work a long time ago. Today we celebrate (and bid farewell to) Jordan after a rigorous and thought-provoking MSc defence, which had the decency to hold its technical issues until after the defence (see our ‘post decision’ picture after the jump. Then, we all gathered so that Jordan could show his spicy food bona fides. It’s a little terrifying to think of how small the lab is getting… it’s high time our Sept cohort started joining us!

I asked Rabia what she would like to do to celebrate her latest paper acceptance (more on that once it appears in print, of course) - and she chose violence. Throwing Axes, Throwing Knives… should I be concerned? Maybe this is a normal reaction to working on a project that involves eukaryotes…