Fungal-Bacterial Wars

Stumbled across an interesting popular science article talking about fungal bacterial warfare, one of my favorite subjects!  

War Between Fungi and Bacteria

Sewing with a tractor beam!

One of the coolest things I've seen lately. Moving objects with sound... so StarTrek!
Check out this video from Science. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/watch-sonic-tractor-beam-do-some-midair-sewing?utm_campaign=news_weekly_2018-12-28&et_rid=190826341&et_cid=2573567

Benjaminiella poitrasii

She is hands down the most gorgeous fungi ever. With pretty ornamental spores spread out on a  velvety dark mycelial mat, she rivals all. With the ability to switch to yeast form when conditions are right she can completely change her style. After extracting her genome, I sent it to the JGI for sequencing. They have just finished annotation on her genome, so she's now ready to play in the big leagues with all the other important fungi with public genome sequences. In this image, you can see the hyphae and yeast forms growing simultaneously next to each other.

Props to Props Discussion

Last night Holly Mayton, Greg Newkirk, Ben Sommerkorn and I met at a brewery downtown to discuss the new ballot measures. All of us have different political leanings, but we had a great time sharing our points of views and arguing for and against the propositions. Amazingly, after a few hours of discussion we were able to come to a consensus on many measures. After we had completed a woman came up to us and introduced herself as a professor at UCR and told us that we had brought tears to her eyes as we were debating the measures. She thanked us and left. I think we were all surprised to learn that someone had been listening and even more we had inspired someone by exemplifying functional civil discourse. I'm convinced that we as a nation need to learn to listen and respect each other. In light of pipe-bombs in the mail and inflammatory language I'd like to focus more on listening than talking this week. I invite you to do the same. Talk to someone with which you don't share view points.

Welcome

Hello All,

Welcome to my website. Here I will be posting updates on research progress and career goals. This is a place that I want to dump my thoughts on policy work, mix it with some science background and see what happens. Thanks for checking it out.

-Derreck