End of 2019!

It has been a while since the last update and a lot of good things happened. 

1) We had a pleasure to host four fantastic Final Year Project (FYP) students for three months.  Ying Kiat (nr. 1 from the left) and Vernice (3) were supervised by Dr. Devendra Shivhare (2) and Dr. Zhu Xinyi (SCELSE, not shown), and have identified many plant extracts that inhibit planktonic and biofilm growth of Pseudomonas ​aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus. Mun Yi (4) and Veronique (6) were supervised by Qiao Wen Tan (5) to study stress memory and cross-acclimation to multiple abiotic stresses in Arabidopsis thaliana​. 

2) The group expanded. Dr. Irene Julca and Dr. Riccardo Delli-Ponti joined to work on the Hedyotis genome project and on an online database capturing expression of biosynthetic pathways, respectively.

3) We finished coordinating the first run of Computational Thinking course (BS1009). Now ~230 students are (theoretically) able to write useful scripts in Python. It was a great experience and we look forward to do it again next year. ​

4) We got some papers out this year and produced two comparative transcriptomic databases: malaria.tools allows comparative genomic and transcriptomic analyses for Plasmodium species, while diurnal.tools can analyse diurnal gene expression in 17 members of Archaeplastida, including  algae and land plants. Diurnal.tools lands in research highlights in Plant Cell and Physiology. 

5) Devendra, Irene and Marek attended a bryophyte workshop in Melbourne in December. It was good to catch up on Marchantia research and hang out with Prof. Dr. Staffan Persson!