Another farewell party

It seems that we are facing a mass exodus. Today we had a small scale party to say goodbye to Michal who is returning to MIT/Broad to finish her PHD.

You might remember that Michal is long-term visitor in the lab who works with us the last few years. Next week she is flying back to Boston, and apparently next time she visit Israel will be after she will finish her PHD. In addition to that exciting event, she will also be a mom next time we meet her...

We had a small party. Due to experiments running on (more on that later), we switch the plan from going out to ordering food in. And since the options were limited, we had a Pizza Party! to remind Michal what she is about to enjoy a lot of in different meetings in the States :-)

Michal treated us to a very impressive (and tasty!) cake.

And also a surprise present of a ball. It turned out that the ball was a puzzle that required some effort.

Although we will continue collaborating with Michal, we will miss her presence at the lab.

New arrival

Today we added another device to our equipment room. Amir from Neotec showed up with a big box.

He installed a Plate Reader - a type of spectrophotometer that can measure multiple points in a multi-well plate. This is useful for many  types of assays. We will use it most often for measuring cell density in each well, and eventually it will be integrated into the robotic platform to be used automatically during the large assays.

As you can see we have space problems, and so the new plate reader was installed on top of a temporary cabinet. Not the most dignified position, but it will do for now.

On another matter, Moran continued her tradition of baking a cake for every submitted manuscript. Today she showed up with a strawberry cheesecake, which was very beautiful and also quite tasty. (It goes without saying that we encourage Moran to submit more manuscripts.)