First off all, the Chromatic bacteria are now accepted with Frontiers (time to pay the open access bill :P ). Secondly, this happened:

Rudolf has won a poster award at the NZMS / NZSBMB annual meeting in Dunedin!

Way to go Rudolf!!!

Congratulations again - well deserved!

And now that - Dr. Monica Gerth received a Marsden Grant and I am part of the team and help her as an associate investigator. We'll investigate evil Pseudomonads :-) my job is to make them glow and track them on their host.

So that just happened - It was just announced that I am the winner of this years University of Canterbury Early and Emerging Researcher Career Researcher Award. I am pretty chuffed/ exited/ honoured/ surprised/ proud

THANKS TO EVERYONE THAT HELPED ME GETTING THERE!  

Michal Bernach has just won two foto prices by 

Preprint online!!! Chromatic bacteria - all spectra - three plasmid series - a real tour de force - thanks everyone that was involved ​http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/402172v1 biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/402172v1

So, Mo just bought a bag of cat litter - Purrfit - my favourite (no commercial interest). This is a truly fast adjustment to the NZ number 8 wire mentality. If life doesn't give you calcined clay from the US - buy something your cat usually does its business in. 
#growingArabidopsis

That was fun! We took the 200-lvl microbiology course to have a look at the waste-water treatment plant in Bromley. Many thanks Adam for being a great tour guide.

Also, the gorgeous weather helped to enjoy the sight. It was a lot less smelly than I imagined.

Woah - so it did work out in the end - together with the group of Christian Ahrens, Agroscope, Switzerland, we had a beautiful study accepted in Nucleic acid research. The preprint can be found here: "Pushing the limits of de novo genome assembly for complex prokaryotic genomes harboring very long, near identical repeats." BioRxiv doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/300186

Thanks for the great collaboration Christian!

So Rudolf seems to binge-watch the Great British Bake off (or similar) these days, which is why he brought a huge plate of leaf-shaped biscuits for his birthday - and check it out, all of them are colonised by coloured bacteria. What fun :-) also delicious ! ​Happy Birthday Rudolf!!!

Remnants of the last postdoc: "Conjugation dynamics of self-transmissible and mobilisable plasmids into E. coli O157:H7 on Arabidopsis thaliana rosettes" can now be found at BioRvix and is under review elsewhere.