Child play

Playing with Legos at work - a dream job. Several educational DNA sets were selected and tests are underway to choose the appropriate one for students.

Human genetics

Sooner or later, one needs to have a good negative or positive control when working with delicate (as the opposite of optimised) protocols. Human DNA seems like a good option and it works great for training purposes. For example, Y chromosome was proven for 2 lab researchers, for a good salmonid karyogram one needs some magic luck. And so when one researcher was isolating DNA from the same two blood samples for the third time, a dozen of his colleagues volunteered. Universality of some mtDNA primers will also be tested.

Some kind of order

There is an inexplicable urge in biology to sort, classify and order. The whole fish business grew over the last few years and so did the number of DNA isolates, primers, fin clips, blood samples and a mountain of working solutions. The time has come to sort them. A database of fish primers was created, stock solutions are now neatly packed in 4 boxes. DNA isolates and fin clips will follow.

Sir Humphry Davy

I read something about Humphry Davy on the BBC News website today. His name appeared on Slovenian TV a few years ago, apparently he was in Podkoren and Ljubljana several times, fly fishing. He even wrote a book "Salmonia or Days of Fly Fishing" (full content), published in 1832. In it, variability of salmonids, over fishing, stocking non native fish and taxonomic problems are mentioned beside personal experience of fly fishing in Great Britain, Ireland, Illyria (more or less present day Slovenia) and in several locations in Austria. Salmon, brown trout, huchen, grayling and charr are discussed, no mention of marble, softmouth or dentex trout.

A new piece of equipment II

As mentioned, a younger and better looking model appeared to present the wonderful new ABI3130xl.

Bilateral cooperation

Saša of the University of Belgrade has joined us in the laboratory for 2 weeks. He is a regular participant at sampling field trips and is the author or coauthor of several papers, mostly on the subject of salmonids of Serbia. His visit was made possible by a bilateral agreement between Slovenia and Serbia promoting scientific cooperation. We got a 2 year grant for our fish project and now we have to spend the money. These two weeks were very busy, he analysed a ton of samples, but we did find some time to enjoy the winter sun.

Update during Carneval season

Our site has some new pages. We have added information for potential undergraduate and PhD students that would like to join us. Most photos on our site is from sampling expeditions, therefore a lot of photos from laboratories and offices of our department were added to the new pages to show a more realistic view of our everyday work.



During the 2000th visitor party (see previous post) we had a lot of great ideas, some of them have now materialised. Services (genotyping of trout and grayling), some marble trout updates and photos from Zeta field trip. Several pages are now available in both English and Slovenian.