Notes from the biomass

One’s happy to be a bioinformatician when the plants look better when you do not take care of them for three weeks.

Back in Berlin this morning from Cuernavaca after two weeks of travel, I try to stay awake until nightfall to minimize the jetlag. So, no science today, just an activity update. We relocated our course to Cuernavaca successfully, only two participants had to cancel. The hurricane was the third most intense ever recorded, luckily missing Cancun and other denser populated area. Cuernavaca only received plenty of rain, a little more than usual in the current rainy season.

Not that I got to see as much of Mexico as I wanted except for the ruins of Xochicalco (pic). Teaching a crowd of smart and motivated young (as in younger than me) was fun and took way into the evening hours. My personal recommendation from the course is the iTOL developed by the Bork group, which is an amazingly versatile flash front end for viewing and annotation of phylogenetic trees. It is powerful and replaces many of the odd tree viewers bioinformatics inherited from the mid-80s.More soon. Good night for now.

Our course on metagenomics, scheduled to start tomorrow in Cancun, has been postponed to Wednesday and will take place on Cuernavaca. Cancun is likely to be affected directly by hurricane Dean. Some of the participants and organizers are already in the region, let’s hope that everything works as smoothly as rescheduling the flights for me. So, for the people back home: I am still in Texas and will not even be in the area.