It’s great to see some of the natural and unexpected synergies that surface at think and drink. Last week was a great example of a talk about modeling of bacterial competition for metabolites followed by a very experimental talk on the actual free energies of various metabolic reactions. Hopefully we are succeeding in fostering new contacts within the institute and related departments.

For our next Think & Drink on February 3 we will have two very different talks. The first from Henry Mattingly (of the Shvartsman lab) will explain his work on how different levels processivity affect multisite phosphorylation. Then Sudarshan Chari (Ayroles lab) will tell us about compensatory evolution in wing development mutants of Drosophila.

2016 promises to be a great year for Think & Drink. We’ve worked very hard to secure a diverse lineup of high quality speakers. We got off to an excellent start last week with Tess and Shilpa’s stories about chromatin and transcription factors across development and species.

I also wanted to thank everyone who came out to show their support for the undergrads at the QCB 302 symposium. The students worked very hard to produce excellent presentations and it was great to see so much of the QCB community show up to support them.

Join us on January 20, for Thibaud Taillefumier of the Wingreen lab who will tell us about bacterial populations of different metabolic types coexist while competing for fixed resources and Lukas Tanner from the Rabinowitz lab who will discuss regulation of glycolytic flux in mammalian cells.