Written by Eric Schneider

Not only is my time here shaping up to be productive, it’s also been becoming a pleasure. Some new friends from the Institute kindly showed me around the nearby city of Oviedo last weekend where they treated me to the city’s lovely regional cuisine, vibrant night life, and bustling market-covered streets. While the fun of the weekend ended, the real fun at work was about to begin. Beyond plotting the resistances of multiple L. lactis strains to varying concentrations of antimicrobial peptides, my assignment has expanded to include cloning foreign DNA into cell cultures to prepare for future tests with an even wider array of cell wall stressors. Good company, good eats, good work. Now if I only could figure out how to roll my R’s…