It's not enough just to show a photo of Pedro from his whirlwind 3-day visit to INVAM in March of 2006. The photo below also chronicles the abundance of cultures he took back with him to Guelph. It was a joint effort: Pedro imported all possible choices from our FileMaker Pro database (a stand-alone version of the web-based Oracle database which is updated biweekly) into Microsoft Excel on his first afternoon and made his choices that evening. The next day he and Bill Wheeler (my intrepid assistant) worked together to collect cultures from the cold room (already in alphabetical order so this phase was completed quickly), label bags, transfer inoculum (the most difficult and time-consuming task to avoid cross-contamination), and box everything up. The packaging of 139 cultures took less than 10 hours, a feat which surprised all of us! I should have known, however, because Bill not only is fast, but very careful and very very experienced in the handling of these culture materials.
Pedro has the distinction of being the first person to take more than 100 cultures from our collection to assist him in his research project. I was very excited by Pedro's visit because it is a milestone in which, for the first time, the breadth of germplasm diversity in the collection finally will be used by "outside" researchers to carry out a defined project that could reap enormous benefits for the collection. He plans to sequence the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I gene of all these isolates and incorporate them into a large Canadian effort to develop a barcoding system for species identification to complement morphological criteria.