9/27/05

We have received the first strains from the Neurospora Functional Genomics Program! More are on their way.

New statistics are available for the FGSC web-site. Since moving the site to the UMKC servers in August, we have averaged over 700 visits per day.  Many of the visits are from an internet service provider headquartered outside Washington DC, but we received visits from countries ranging from Australia to Zimbabwe. We get approximately equal numbers of visitors from the US and from abroad. The median time a visitor stays at the FGSC web-site is 20 minutes.

9/12/05

On Friday, I visited the UMKC Miller Nichols Library and borrowed 4 DVDs, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Meet the Parents, 2 Mules for Sister Sarah, and A Fish Called Wanda. Between soccer games and lawncare, we managed to watch two and that was enough. I get to keep them for two weeks. I do not think that they will give Blockbuster much competition, as the selection is rather limited. But it certainly is convenient.

Jessica  Rabbit  gives an important message to kids when she says "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way"

Recent updates to the FGSC homepage feature a rotating homepage image as well database updates.

Did you know that the FGSC is mentioned 52,776  times in the NCBI Nucleotide database? Or that FGSC shows up 32,731 times in the NCBI Protein database? FGSC only shows up 22 times in the Pubmed database, but 890 times in a Google Scholar search, and 88,700 times in a Google search!

9/1/05

We had a visit from the Investigation branch of the US Department of Agriculture today. They wanted to understand what was going on with our permit to hold plant pathogenic fungi. It seems that when we renewed our permit, it was more convenient for someone in the USDA bureaucracy to put the 14 species for which we have a permit onto the application for a permit to add Stagnospora nodorum, rather than to add Stagnospora to our permit which covered all the other fungi in the collection. When the inspector arrived, I showed him the 'conditions pages' for our permit which specifically lists all the fungi that we are authorized to keep in our collection. Apparently only the cover page listing Stagnospora was forwarded to the Missouri office. He left happy and I was greatly relieved not to be "invited" to accompany him. The USDA also has a program to find lost pets!

We do try to follow all of the rules pertaining to work with plant pathogenic fungi and encourage others to do so as well.