The 2021 Dey Lab Retreat/Sampling Extravaganza

Finally at full force, the Dey Lab went on a productive two day trip to the Odenwald.

The programme was devoted to preparing our lab’s foray into Myxomycetes research. We started off by sampling bark and leaf litter around the hotel with the aim of identifying and growing up some slime molds, followed up with a hike through the Odenwald and Felsenmeer - a “river'“ of granite boulders that was once a Roman quarry - and wrapped up the day with a custom-designed Dey Lab board game night.

Day 2 was all science - brainstorming experiments for a 2-week lab “hackathon” early next year focussed on slime molds, in which we temporarily suspend our regular work, invite some local and remote collaborators to join us, and dive headfirst into a new field! If this first 2022 attempt goes well, we will try to make it a Dey Lab annual event.

As it turns out, our little sampling expedition was more successful than we expected - example below of a Myxomycetes plasmodium that took hold of the bark substrate in the lab. Next step, shift it to a pure lab culture if we can, sequence, identify, and onwards to some cell biology!