The last remaining loose strands of my graduate school ...

... days have been tied. Received word recently that a manuscript I was co-first-author (is there really such a thing?) on has been accepted. It was the last major aspect of my dissertation, and it involved some slick bioinformatics work and some even slicker expression assays that added a good chunk (if I do say so myself) to the existing knowledge about the regulon I was studying. This work was to form the bulk of my final manuscript, but got held up by various issues. By then I was knee deep into my post-doc and the demands of writing those papers superseded IMO any obligation I had to work on my graduate school manuscripts. It led to a semi-scoop on part of the system (which meant I didn't get to name the gene we identified a function for), even though I eventually got that published on its own anyways. This was supposed to be the grand finale, but was handed over to another person in the lab for additional work and stood that way for awhile. Almost five years after I walked out the door of graduate school, it's been published.

In a way it is pretty liberating. Thank goodness it's now over!