So first let me say - all my students are great (micro)biologists! But there is this one guy that doesn't seem to be satisfied with being a good biologist. Rudolf apparently has some time to spare to also aspire to become the World's best baker (as you can see he also has two price certificates as proof now). Not only did his cake look gorgeous, it also tasted amazing.

Congratulations to winning two prices here Ru!

Also in the news, I am proud to announce that I just got the confirmation that my promotion application was accepted and that I am now a Senior Lecturer - maybe comparable to a recently promoted Associate Professor in the US system.

​Thanks to everyone that helped me on that way. 

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!