London

I'm now in London, having shaken Vince and his new post-doc, Ming. It's cold, but that isn't exactly unexpected. I arrived this afternoon after a 6 hour coach ride from Manchester, and wandered up to look at Buckingham Palace, given that it's only a short walk away. I was underwhelmed, and remember feeling the same the last 2 times I'd seen it, but the parks around the palace are pretty cool. Tomorrow I meet up with my brother, Angus, and Saturday I leave for Font. Angus doesn't get in tomorrow until late-ish, so I plan to spend the day checking out London. I'm sure Dad would be unimpressed if I didn't check out the British Museum, but I'd also like to get to the Dali Museum.

The Genomes to Systems Conference was good. There were some incredibly interesting talks, and a number of talks that showed that just because you have a swag of Nature and Science papers, or even a Nobel Prize, doesn't mean you'll give a good presentation. Masaru Tomita presented on the basis of this paper, and basically said: "Yeah we have a shitload of data, but don't really know what it means". And they do have a shitload of data - and equipment. He put up a slide that outlined what MS based machines they have, and there were roughly 100! Given that a GC/MS costs in the vicinity of $100,000, that is a ridiculous amount of stuff.
As always, this conference was a real eye-opener as to what people can do. From a more useful point of view, the European Bioinformatics Institute ran some workshops on some of the tools they have available, and there's much more than I was ever aware of. They're doing a training course in June at Cambridge, so I've decided to cut my time in Germany a little short and attend that. I suggested to Vince that it might be worth getting them out to do some training days in Sydney, so we'll see about that when I get back.
Probably the most important thing to come out of the conference though was the discovery that 2 of My Favourite Genes show haplo-insuffiency in continuous culture when grown in grape juice. This finding came out of work done by Steve Oliver's group, so I'm in a perfect position to take advantage of it. Booyah.