On WEAST

Hey y'all! I'm writing a breif entry about our WEAST meeting. Since everyone has been scolding me for not having blogged yet, I figured better a short entry than no entry at all.

Today we had our last WEAST meeting of the summer :(. As sarah would say, sad day. WEAST meetings are these wonderful meetings that we've organized with some of the other labs that use yeast ( hence weast, wes yeast). They are super helpful for learning how to present your material to others, dealing with questions and troubleshooting. I think it is very nice to have meetings with people who know the organism and can bring different perspectives and advice to the table on a particular project.

Since today was our last day of the summer we had tons of food (nom nom). Rozina and I presented the work that we have been doing, which is basically to create a tool, in our case a temperature sensative allele, that will allow us to investigate the role of Zip2, Zip3 and Zip4 in synaptonemal complex, the protein that holds homologs together during Meiosis I. In case you were wondering what the above picture is, it was a drawing I did for our presentation of abnormal and normal synaptonemal complex.

I think the presentation went more or less smoothly, there were a couple of questions that I had some difficulty with but overall it was a great learning experience. We have presented our work a few times now and each time we learn something new about how to present, or the content itself. I hope that WEAST will be able to continue into the year and I think that it's the kind of meeting that all labs should be doing in their field on a regular basis because it promotes sharing of information, ideas and thereby progress and forward momentum