Happy mothur's day!
At least in the United State’s, Sunday was Mother’s Day. The day we acknowledge the women that brought us into the world and the women that have helped care for us. Happy belated Mother’s Day! We also love to mark Mother’s Day as mothur’s Day. When I can remember, I try to do something special to mark the date.
Way back in the bad old days of Sanger sequencing, we published papers describing two software programs - DOTUR and SONS. These programs did essentially what cluster, summary.single, summary.shared, collect.single, and rarefaction.shared now do within mothur. With the growing use of 454 sequencing in 2007, I started what is now mothur to better accommodate these larger datasets. People would frequently tell me that I should develop a program named for my wife. But I couldn’t think of a name so the plan was to update the software as DOTUR version 2.0 to reflect the significant update to the program and the fact that the baby we were expecting was our second daughter. Of course, the expected baby turned out to be a boy, so that wouldn’t work. In a flash of genius, I decided to name the program mothur. The baby in iconic mothur picture is that baby - John. John recently turned 8 and my wife regularly says, “Do you really still have that picture of John on me on your website?”
Back in January I announced a competition to generate a new mothur logo that we could use to generate stickers for laptops and other swag. The plan was to also take my wife and John down from the website and replace them with the new logo. I received about 15 outstanding submissions and had a very difficult time whittling the choice down to one image. The winning entry belonged to Linda Wampach.
I felt like it really captured the concept from the original picture as well as the roots of the project going back to the days of looking at Sanger chromatograms. Thanks to Linda for the great design! I asked Linda to provide a small introduction of herself…
My name is Linda Wampach and I’m from the small but cozy piece of land, called Luxembourg. I’m a doctoral student at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine and my main focus is the colonization of the gastrointestinal microbiome in newborns. Besides being busy with wet lab techniques and bioinformatics softwares on a daily basis, I’ve grown particularly fond of scientific illustrations and use my free time to learn more about graphic design and to enhance my skills.
I appreciate the effort all of the other individuals put out to design some great submissions. I have ordered a big stack of stickers that will hopefully be ready for people presenting their mothur-aided work at the 2015 ASM meeting in New Orleans.
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