Continued cool, cloudy weather with occasional rain today. Is the summer heat gone for good? I doubt it, but I hope so.

Robin reports that Enid didn’t want to be dropped off at school the past few mornings. She dragged her feet about going in the door, said she didn’t want to go to school, etc. It’s nothing new though. Enid frequently displayed the same reluctance when we dropped her off at school in Yountville. Sometimes it was even worse, with screaming and crying. But then when we’d go pick her up at the end of the day she wouldn’t want to leave and it was clear that she really loved school. Her morning behavior doesn’t seem to reflect her true feelings about school, so I’m not too worried about it. But it’s a bummer for Robin, and a frustrating, depressing way to start each morning.

Our cátedra (me, Sean, Luis and José) met today to discuss our research goals. We agreed to narrow our focus to non-Hodgkins lymphomas, multiple myeloma and breast cancer. I suggested that there were five high-throughput genomic analysis methods we should consider trying to implement in our lab: microarray resequencing, microarray comparative genomic hybridization, microarray gene expression profiling, microarray methylation profiling, and microarray miRNA expression profiling. I think the last two would be really great to implement because they are fairly recent technologies, whereas the others have been around for quite a while, and people have already used them to examine various cancers pretty thoroughly. With the methylation profiling and (especially) miRNA profiling there’s still a chance to make a unique contribution. It seemed like my suggestions were fairly well received. Anyway, a “maybe” is as good as a “yes” for me and I’m going to press on with researching the methodologies and putting together a plan to implement them technically. I’ve only got a year to get something done here, so I need to get started.