NZ Rhizobia

My favourite song of the New Zealand band 'Headless Chickens' is called "Day of the Locust" from their third album "Greedy" released 1997. I bought this album on release in my teens. I could not find any lyrics online, so I transcribed them here myself. My copy of the album was unfortunately destroyed. As an interesting note both the bass guitarist and the drummer of this band (during this album) are also named Bevan!. Lyrics and music copyright Headless Chickens 1997, transcription CC BY 4.0 Bevan Weir 2021:

Thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I have spent most of my working days at home rather than going to the office. Since I have a 50 km commute per day, I noticed that I am using much less petrol in the car. This got me wondering if this was a universal trend.

This collections of links is mostly for me, it links directly to the searchable web database rather than a webpage about the collection itself.

I can never seem to get on top of my emails, I feel like there is just too many coming in to deal with, many need considered answers or actual work to be done. Currently I am sitting on 281 unread emails which never seems to reduce.

I wondered if there was a way to plot my unread email over time, to feel some sense of accomplishment in dealing with these. I didn't manage to find a way how to do this, but I did find a piece of software called OutlookStatView that extracts statistics from your email inbox.

GenBank from the NCBI is an amazing and invaluable resource for DNA sequences, and combined with the searching tool BLAST it is really easy to identify your unknown gene sequence.

The trouble is that many of the organism identifications of GenBank sequences are dubious, outdated, or just plain wrong. Identifying a sequence as the wrong species is just bad science no matter what your reason, but is especially important for regulatory agencies. The problem of incorrect identifications is a self-compounding problem as these incorrect identifications are used by other sequence submitters to name their sequences.

Dear Colletotrichum community, Some of us use molecular data to untangle the systematics of the economically important genus Colletotrichum and combine this with morphological features and host preferences, while others study infection strategies and look for explanations for pathogenicity by studying genomes and gene expression or screen control measures to reduce yield loss.

Agrobacterium is a well-known genus in bacteriology and molecular biology, but research has shown that it cannot easily be separated from the Rhizobium genus, thus all Agrobacterium species should be renamed as Rhizobium species (the earlier name). However there has been some opposition to renaming Agrobacterium, in this article I explain the research and taxonomy, and suggest a solution.

The recent revisions of Colletotrichum taxonomy have been fantastic for stabilising and modernising our concepts of this important plant pathogen. However, many of the new species are very difficult to distinguish by morphology alone, and multiple gene sequences are required.

Recently Lei Cai and I set up the International Subcommission on Colletotrichum Taxonomy (ISCT) to deal with recent changes in the ICN nomenclatural code. Our main objective is to produce lists of accepted and rejected names in Colletotrichum before the next IMC fungal conference.

The major publication of my postdoc is now out — all 65 pages of it — in Studies in Mycology. In this publication we review the taxonomy of the fungus commonly known as Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, and reveal that is a complex (or species aggregate) of 22 different species. We also recognise one subspecies, and informally recognise another “species” at the f. sp. level (pending further research).