Cycling at the head of the Lahntal

Today we caught the train to Feudingen near the headwaters of the Lahn to cycle back to Friedensdorf where we started last Saturday - a distance of about 30 km. The first part of the cycleway was gravel through the forest which was nice but then we hit the asphalt at Bad Laasphe to cruise most of the rest of the way. Christine has now completed around 180 km of the approx 240 km of the Lahntal cycle trail - she plans to complete the final section from Limberg to Koblenz this week.

The Germans are very big on recycling which impresses me. There is a surcharge of 25 cents on all their plastic bottles which is great to see. There is a machine at the Supermarket down the hill where you can 'post' your plastic bottles from which you receive a credit toward your next supermarket purchase. Very hard to persuade politicians to do this in NZ but it would help keep the streets free of plastic bottles.

I have now submitted Matt Nicholson's manuscript to Toxins - great to have that one cleared from my desk. On Friday I met with two more researchers from the Kahmann lab; post doc Liang Liang and PhD student Nicole Ludwig. Liang has been working on an effector that is required for the very early stages of maize leaf infection. Nicole is just 6 months into her PhD and is off to a great start by identifying another gene required for early infection. She took me up to the greenhouse on top of the building to see the tumours that develop on maize leaves when infected with U. maydis. Libera was infecting some seedlings while we were there. It is a very straightforward process of injecting 1 ml of inoculum straight into the stem of the maize plant - much easier than E. festucae infections of ryegrass.