lab phylogeny

It's been a month since Dr. Breznak officially retired. The Breznak's and Schmidt's lab have worked together since Dr. Schmidt joined MSU in 1982..the year I was born!! Dr. Breznak was one of the professor whose work had drawn me to MSU. I was always intrigue by the symbiotic relationship between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Unfortunately, he was already planning for retirement when I joined MSU. But when I joined the Schmidt lab, I had the opportunity to interact with him and I sure was excited to have a well-known scientist critique my work and ideas. Since we work so closely with each other, we call ourselves the Schmeznaks. Wertiplasma suffocatus is the last graduate student of Dr. Breznak and he will be graduating soon. Then it'll just be the Schmidt lab.

The phylogeny shown above is drawn by Jake as a retirement gift for Dr. Breznak. Isn't it awesome? Most of the characters do resemble the real person. My immediate boss is Schmidtaceae ribosomerus. Currently, I'm the newest lab member and most of them are on close to graduation or post-docs except for Levinella methanophage who is one year my senior. If we don't get any new graduate students this year, it's gonna a lot less people by the time I'm done with my exam end of next year. Just incase some of you wonder what 'brevis' means..it means short...coz I'm the shortest in the lab AND my height is below average for the Americans.