Thankfulness Friday - Busy Week

Electron micrograph of phage Garlic that I extracted in 2009.  They lived in soil from Mom's vegetable garden where we had just harvested garlic.  The big dark colored heads contain DNA.

Another very busy week and partially productive.  A colleague and I have been team teaching a Phage Genomics course.  In the fall semester, students extract bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) from soil samples, isolate and purify the DNA, and analyze the phages' morphology by electron microscope.  During Christmas break, two phages were sent away for whole genome sequencing.  In the spring semester which I teach, the students analyze the sequences and annotate the genes.  This the third year for us to offer the course and the first year where two phages were analyzed.  I am happy to say that this week, we managed to finish the analysis of the first phage.  The annotations will be published soon on the National Center for Biotechnology Information.  The students did a lot of work on this, taking almost 6 weeks.  I had to double check their work before sending it out for further quality control.  Also this week, we started the analysis of the second phage.  I had to put in a bit of bench work for that, too.  The down side to all this is that I had very little time to do many other important things and am afraid that I've fallen behind in my own research work.