Brazil day 2

I am still in Brazil.

It was cold last night and I had bad dreams. Also, I turned off my alarm and woke up just after the first presentation, on the sugarcane system in Brazil. But I got to enjoy a little coffee break on my own.

During the coffee break I met Nick Carpita and his wife, Maureen McCann. They are both very friendly and easy to talk to. They went to the ASPB meeting in Montreal, and then to the Cell Wall meeting in Portugal, and now they are in Brazil. Nick is in charge of reimbursing the students sponsored by ASPB, including me, so I thought it important to introduce myself.

I wore my American flag pin.

Before the next set of talks I met a Canadian involved in miscanthus and fiber production, who was very excited to talk to me about pretreatment and the new pretreatment scheme he is involved in. They grind particles to 2 mm lengths and then pass them through a pump which causes cavitation. The material enters at 50 C and exits at 80 C, after only a second of residence time. Also, the material is now dissolvable and the hemicellulose and lignin are no longer an obstacle. We both agreed that the economics are unfavorable, because of the grinding and high pressure required, but he was still very excited that cavitation could have such an effect. I think he speaks tomorrow.

All the talks have a very general attitude towards the science, which is frustrating because I think all of us are well acquainted with the generalities. I want to see particulars! I will understand what they are talking about! There were short talks in the afternoon selected from abstracts, and these were far more specific about research results rather than scientific trends.

I was able to have rice and beans both for lunch and dinner. Whoop! There is always an impressive array of antipasta – meat and cheese cubes and olives (but no nuts! And this is Brazil!). Also there is a fine assortment of desserts of different fruit flavors. They are all gooey and creamy, not many cookies or cakes or chocolates. Also there is always fresh pineapple and fresh mango.

There is a giant fruit sculpture present at every meal which appears to be two phoenixes or other winged creatures, carved out of a green-skinned, orange-fleshed melon, with beet rosettes for decoration. I hope it is still up tomorrow so I can take a picture of it.

I hung my poster during the afternoon coffee break, when I realized that I had interpreted the dimensions backwards, and the poster should have been taller than it was wide. I later discovered I was not the only American to have made this mistake, which made me feel less embarrassed. As it was the poster seemed to be huge, because it had to have a spot all to itself on the back wall – none of the normal poster locations could accommodate it.

The poster session was right before dinner, and was very poorly attended. It also was not noted on the program schedule. However, I got to explain the idea to several cell wall biologists, and they understood it, and they didn’t think it was bunk. This was very encouraging. Nick Carpita pointed out that the size of Tdtomato might be responsible for the signal retention after SDS treatment – the fluorescent protein may be too large to dissipate through the cell wall pores regardless of whether it is anchored.

I had dinner with Nick Carpita and Maureen McCann and Ariel N--- from Santiago. We talked mostly about earthquakes and tsunamis, and a little bit about exo-glucuronidases. At that point in the conversation I excused myself to go to bed. It feels very late very early, because the sun starts going down between 5:30 and 6. There are no clocks anywhere, and I am keeping my cell phone off to save the battery, so it is hard to know what time it is except when they announce it is meal time. At any rate, the sun was totally down before 7.

Now I know a few more conference people. Tomorrow I hope to meet even more. It is very enlivening to describe research to people who are understanding it. For example, I now have the idea to submit my onion gene gun technique to JOVE, the journal of online visual experiments. Hurray for the Congress!