Monday, March 15, 2010

Live Imaging Day

Today we had at the institute a meeting of the Israeli Live Imaging Forum. This included talks from groups from all over Israel, and one international keynote. Many talks with extremely cool movies, ranging from intra-nuclear bodies moving, yeast dividing, cells migrating during development, to flying bats. (That is not a joke, the welcome speech by the institute head had an example of imaging without a microscope :-)

It was good to see Ifach, my ex-student who is now starting his one lab at Tel-Aviv University. (Incidentally, he arrived in August, and his lab renovations, that included rebuilding everything from scratch, are finished, and cost in terms of $/m^2 less than half of our renovations. It will remain a big mystery why renovations here are so expensive.)

I showed Iftach the lab, and we had interesting discussion about PCR machines, the MasterClave, and the the other toys. Funny that I didn't think that would be our main chatting point, back when he was student. Iftach made the point that they had problems with agar going too soft due to high acidity of the water they used. This might explain some of the issues we had recently with soft agar.

Another attendant was Nir Friedman of the Weizmann Institute (AKA as "the other Nir Friedman"). His student gave a very good talk, where the original few slides were very in step with the kind of questions we plan to ask in the lab. In this sense, it seems that we are drawing closer in terms of our scientific interests.

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