The chalk talks are really interesting and enriching as a whole as we got to listen to each other’s work and the reasons behind the works. It is very enthralling to hear about fin regeneration in zebrafish or modularities in mantis shrimp but as someone who really likes the microbial world, I thought that Michael’s work on halophiles really piqued my curiosity about the Archaea world.
Having learnt about conjugation in bacteria, it was very intriguing to hear about the similar horizontal gene transfer process in Halobacterium and even about what the differences are, especially the fact that in Archaea, horizontal transfer occurs more often between chromosomes, which could have conferred certain evolutionary benefits to the halophiles. It would be interesting to study the rationale behind this difference and from there, learn about the evolutionary history of prokaryotes. And yes, one last thing, Halobacterium is not a bacterium…
