Way to go, Tom!!! Congratulations to Marie Curie-postdoc

For those of you who did not already know this, our beloved former co-worker Tom Gosden received a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the "Marie Curie"-programme. I wrote a blogpost also about this at the CAnMove-blogg, which you can read here. This is good news, not only for Tom, but also for me and our entire research laboratory, since Tom will return to Lund in the third year of his postdoc, with the aim to build up a Drosophila-laboratory here, in collaboration with me.

Tom's brave decision to move from a field-based evolutionary ecology system (Ischnura elegans, his thesis-work) to a more classical lab-based system of Drosophila will most likely pay off in the future. Hopefully, in the future we can combine concepts and methods from the Drosophila-world with the Ischnura-system, particularly if we one day are able to characterize the colour morph-locus of I. elegans at the DNA-sequence level.

Although we are not there yet, Maren Wellenreuther will next year start on her Marie Curie postdoc project that will bring us closer to that long-term goal, with the primary (and more realistic) aim to first produce a linkage map and find a molecular marker of the morph-locus. Luckily, we have molecular ecology expert help from Bengt Hansson in this hunt for the magic morph gene.