Well, the time has officially arrived! Next week, I will begin my preliminary exams to fulfill my requirements to move from a Ph.D student to a Ph.D candidate! This means that starting on Monday, I will start a week of written exams, one from each of my dissertation committee members.
As mentioned in the project description of my Aeromonas work, we are currently working with two different strains/genotypes of virulent Aeromonas hydrophila. Dealing with multiple strains of a bacteria can prove difficult with creating vaccines or administering antibiotics so we wanted to see how the temporal distribution of these two strains compared.