Sabbaticals are back: how to make the most of them

Abstract

In 2009, Brenda Wingfield completed the sequence of the pathogen Fusarium circinatum -the first fungal genome to be fully sequenced on the African continent -which causes local pine trees to wilt and ooze resin. But the fungal geneticist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa had a problem: she didn't know how to annotate and analyse a whole genome.Wingfield found her solution half a world away in the United States, where F. circinatum is also a problem. She trained in these genomics techniques during a sabbatical at the Genome Center of the University of California, Davis."That was mind-blowing, learning genomics that I'd never done before," she recalls. Wingfield brought her new-found expertise back home to Pretoria, where she hosted a weeklong "genome annotation jamboree".