11/29/05

The orders keep coming in! We have had a busy week already and it is only Tuesday. Yesterday Sheera and Rachel were making lyophils and noticed that the second lyophilizer jar leaked. The vacuum did not come down and so some of the samples thawed. When we changed the lid for the jar, the vacuum came down and the thawed samples boiled. They did dry overnight, but they have a glassy, dispersed character. Having seen this happen confirms what we assumed about old lyophils that had the same fluffy glassy, dispersed appearance.

In other news, we escaped the snow that blanketed much of the mid-west. We seem to be protected by something people around here call the Tonganoxie split. Somehow weather does seem to miss Kansas City. I think that it is a combination of being just where weather from the West meets up with weather from the South. St. Louis, a few hundred miles East of KC gets more of everything than KC.

11/16/05

I have just finished my annual lectures on medical mycology to the medical students at University of Kansas Medical Center. Second year medical students taking Microbiology 850 get four hours of mycology instruction which includes infection, allergies, toxins, and therapies. Doing this has been quite an education for me, since most of my training is in Plant Pathology. Good feedback today included the course director's comment that my lectures maintained a strong clinical emphasis. Maybe my early work at MGH did rub off a bit. I couldn't have done it without the great resources at DoctorFungus.org and the US CDC Public Health Information Library.

The FGSC has just received several new vectors constructed by Dr. M. Freitag for expression of the Red Fluorescent Protein in fungi.

11/2/05

News from the American Association for the Advancement of Science includes the naming of 13 fungal geneticists as fellows. This is a great thing for fungal genetics. The honorees are: Arturo Casadevall,  Aaron Mitchell,  Louise Glass,  Jim Haber,  Phil Hieter,  Nancy Keller,  Linda Lasure, JiuJiang Yu, Berl Oakley, Tom Petes,  Pat Pukkila,  Eric Selker,  Fred Sherman,  David Soll,  Kevin Struhl,  and Margaret Werner-Washburne. Click HERE for more information.