Who dented the car?

Shock and horror when I came out of work tonight to see a big dent in the front left corner of Regine's BMW which she has lent to us for the long weekend. I knew I had not hit anything so was quite surprised it had potentially been swiped by another car at work. But closer inspection once I got back to the Guest showed there was rust in the middle of the dent. Whoo! What a relief. Today has been very cold with a little rain so very different to our first two and half weeks of sunny spring weather. Tomorrow is a public holiday in Germany as it is 1 May. Having a car for the weekend means we will be able to explore a little further afield than we have managed on our bikes.

Yesterday I had stimulating discussions with post doc Lay Sun and PhD student Xiaowei. Both are working on effectors. Lay Sun reminded me of how difficult it is to prove an effector is being transferred to the cytosol of the plant cell. One method they use which is very helpful is to soak the leaves in NaCl which causes the plant cells to plasmolyse around the hyphae making it easier to see if a reporter such as GFP is just in the hyphae or also in the surrounding space. The discussion with Xiaowei had a similar theme. Checking for secretion of an effector out of the fungus is reasonably straight forward but showing uptake into the plant cell is more difficult. Having a 3D structure of Cmu1, which he presented at Asilomar, is allowing him to use a rational design approach to analysing the function of the protein.

Today I reviewed the 9th manuscript of the 10 I have to manage for the August issue of Current Opinion in Plant Biology. Just one more referee report needed before all have gone back to authors for revision. This is the first time I have been in an editorial role for a journal. Quite a cumbersome portal to get familiar with but I have now got the hang of it. Of course I have learnt a lot reading these 10 manuscripts. Hopefully dealing with the revisions will be more straightforward.

I enjoyed catching up with Katrin this morning and Kimberly late afternoon by Skype.