Chimera!

I did it! Finished one big task for the week, my thesis committee, I gave my talk today. Hmm! Lots of questions too, managed to answer few, the rest my boss rescued me, over all I guess they were happy. Got lots of suggestions for my next two years work. Opps! Lots of things to do. As my committee members started giving theirs suggestions, I felt this tiny 20 micron ‘monster’ Diatom was challenging me and will keep me busy in the days to come. As I wrote in my blog earlier, diatoms are formed when a non-photosynthetic (‘animal like’) cell engulfed a photosynthetic (‘plant like’) cell, well this event, speculated to happen 200 million years ago and now the study of diatom genome started showing its evidences for this historical event, with its chimeric nature. I was always interested in reading human psychology, discovering the devilish and divine chimeric nature of us, now discovering the same in diatoms. I guess the Chimera; the Greek mythological monster is driving my life. Thats the image about the Diatom Evolution from Armbrust et al., Science 306, 79 -86 (2004)