Wayne Riekhof
@wayneriekhof
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I study metabolism in algae and fungi, but in a parallel universe, I’m an insect taxonomist. Also, I teach. Associate Professor of Biology at @UNLincoln .
Lincoln, NE
Joined June 2008
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I guess you can say my lab is the very definition of “multicultural.”
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New rotation student is really impressing me on his first day in the lab.
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25 years after doing my first E. coli transformation, I still get that little hit of dopamine from seeing colonies on the plate the morning after (and I was just sticking plates in the fridge for a student!)
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Prepping for a class session on the Lac operon in Molecular Biology and it prompts my yearly reminder to you all that what we were taught about the actual substrate of the Lac operon is almost certainly wrong...1
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Also to my fellow 40-something GenX’ers, Steve Martin was 42 and John Candy was 37 when this was shot.
“I never did introduce myself. Del Griffith, American Light and Fixture. Director of sales, shower curtain ring division. I sell shower curtain rings. Best in the world.”
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Every time I feel the urge to offer unsolicited career advice to students or post docs, I stop and think about this picture. And then I shut my mouth and mind my own business until my opinion is asked for.
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This is gorgeous! For those that don’t know: this is what happens when different species of fungi colonize the same log, and the black lines are sites of melanin synthesis at zones where 2 competitors meet and engage in chemical warfare.
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Last year I crossed a potato with a tomato, and established these F1 “pomatoes” that produce 🍅 up top and 🥔 underground. So while I’ll miss the students and the science, I think getting these into production is my real life’s calling. Being a professor was fun, tho. Thanks all!
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My PhD advisor’s advice upon starting my lab 10 years ago: “Just recruit smart people and let them do whatever the hell they want, then worry about how to keep it funded.”
That’s exemplified in this photo of Quin, a first year student working in the lab… (1/2)
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Result we never followed up on from a summer REU student a few years ago: a bacterium that stimulates algae growth also stimulates Arabidopsis. Plants on the left are from otherwise sterile seeds soaked in the bacterial culture. On the right, just growth media with no bacteria.
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It’d be a lot more fun to review manuscripts if we got a free Personal Pan Pizza from Pizza Hut after every 8 manuscripts we review.
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@michaelharriot
At least in Missouri, and I only associate this with Baptist churches, but 1st Baptist is the white church. 2nd Baptist is the black church. My town also had Zion UCC and Zion AME. 4 churches for 200 people.
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Also if you only know about Monod from learning the lac operon, look him up! Dude spent the early 40s fighting Nazis as a leader of the resistance in Vichy France, and discovering diauxic growth, which set the stage for the work on the lac operon 15-20 years later.
Prepping for a class session on the Lac operon in Molecular Biology and it prompts my yearly reminder to you all that what we were taught about the actual substrate of the Lac operon is almost certainly wrong...1
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Experimenting with fermented hot sauce recipes with store-bought Habeneros. The recipes all say “leave the lid loosely capped to allow CO2 to escape” but I think I can do better than that.
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Has anyone tried brewing beer with a lab yeast strain? BY474x? W303? SEY621x? The lab group chat has turned to speculation about what bread or beer made with S288c derivatives would taste like.
Anyone?
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And beta-galactosyl glycerol IS in fact a very, very potent activator of the Lac operon, since it binds LacI with much higher affinity than either lactose or allolactose.
So the point of all this is that plant lipids are interesting in ways you might not have expected...9/9
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I feel like Alexander Fleming in reverse this morning. There is a very potent antifungal compound being produced from this fungal/bacterial community that it inhibiting this contaminating Penicillium colony. Now I want to know what it is!
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This is a 20x20 cm Petri dish with YPD agar (lotsa sugar & nutrients, fungi love it!)
I opened it for a few seconds during a snowstorm in Jan 2017 such that ~1 snowflake per cm^2 landed on the surface.
3 days at 30° C or 86° F and I got this:
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I grabbed the balsamic vinegar earlier this evening, but it has totally solidified! It doesn’t even look or feel gelatinous, just hard as a rock.
Anyone know what’s going on here? I’m a decent chemist, but I can’t think of the polymer chemistry that would lead to this…
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Fun factoid: If you regularly read/teach papers from the dawn of molecular biology in the 40's/50's, as I do, you see a lot of references to what we now call DNA as "sodium thymonucleate"...
70 years ago, 3 papers appeared in
@Nature
under the title ‘Molecular structure of nucleic acids’. In an article in Nature today (link at end)
@nccomfort
and I shed new light on ‘what Watson and Crick really took from Rosalind Franklin’. This thread summarises our findings. 1/23
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Seeing lots of spring gardening tweets makes me reflect on tree planting. Of course the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but luckily for us the second best time to plant a tree is right now.
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Whenever I see an ad for "micellar water" I get irrationally angry and yell at the TV "You mean soap! water containing detergent micelles is just soapy water!"
Now when those commercials come on, the kids just look at me and cut me off and say "We know. Soapy water. We get it."
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Actually, it all makes sense if you think about in terms of our post-weaning diet, and in the context of the most abundant beta-galactoside in the biosphere: Monogalactosyldiacylglycerol, or MGDG...6
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Me: hey why is there a snowball in the downstairs freezer?
Kid: oh that’s mine. Don’t throw it out! I’m going to save it til like July and hit somebody when they least expect it.
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I really like popcorn. I mean, who doesn’t? But have we tried heating other cereal grains to the point they they just explode? Popwheat? Poprice? Popbarley? Popoats? I mean, good lord, we need to at least try!!!
Take this as a challenge, my plant-breeder friends. Let’s go 👍🏻.
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"The most abundant beta-galactoside in the biosphere, huh?" Yes, it's the major bulk of the thylakoid membrane in plant chloroplasts. Anywhere you see green in nature, those photosystems and and all that chlorophyll are embedded in a membrane that is >50% MGDG...7
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Thrilled to accept this invitation to join the editorial board of my favorite journal:
@jbiolchem
!
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And yeah I *did* click on it to see why "urine" is trending and my fears are confirmed. Covid quackery has gone on to it's logical endpoint. I'll save you the trouble and just communicate the gist with this well-worn Bear Grylls meme:
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BUT! The fact remains that mammalian guts are not typically colonized by E. coli until after weaning. So E. coli is not normally going to see lactose (milk sugar) in it's native environment (at least historically, before we started milking dairy animals ~5000 years ago)...4
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The canonical story is that LacY and LacZ are expressed at low levels, and that when cells run out of glucose in the presence of lactose (galactose-beta 1,4-glucose) they use the transglycosylase activity of LacZ to convert lactose to allolactose (Gal-beta-1,6 glucose)...2
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Teaching microbial grwth is a yrly reminder that log phase is a v/ rare phenom in nature. Stationary phase is the rule. Starvation the norm.
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I saw Willie Nelson trending and thought "Oh, come on, not today Satan!" and then I realized it's just about Willie supporting Beto O'Rourke and generally being awesome and I feel relieved.
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So why evolve this elaborate regulatory system for using a sugar that they are unlikely to encounter, and what's up with the fact that lactose itself is NOT an inducer and has to be converted to allolactose in order to bind and inactivate the repressor? Weird, right?...5
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I'd like to go back in time and find the person who gave yeast mating types the designations "a" and "α" and have a word with them...
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Hey gang, just posting this again for max exposure: We have a faculty position open in the broad area of "Genes, Genomes, and Evolution." I'm on the search committee, and we want as large and as diverse an applicant pool as we can muster! 1/
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Text I got from chair of promotion and tenure committee a few min ago after the faculty voted on my case today...
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Anyone ever review a manuscript where the authors describe a "novel method" for assaying a hard to assay enzyme, but you and a collaborator had actually invented the described method and published it 15 years ago? Yeah, me neither...until yesterday 😂
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My silly April Fools post about a “pomato” hybrid has been viewed almost 50,000 times. I might call up my former colleague
@iochromaland
, an expert in the population genetics of Solanaceae, to see if we can make this happen for real…
Let’s give the people what they want!
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I live with 3 boys, aged 12, 13, and 14. They are obsessed with baking. They got up before dawn to make strawberry shortcakes for breakfast.
I feel like I’m living the real life version of “The Bear” 😂
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I have some colleagues who study bird communication, but after driving all day today and watching many hawks soaring overhead along the way, I'm more concerned with their internal monolog.
I assume it's just "Whoa dude, I'm flying! This. Is. AWESOME!!!" repeated on a loop...
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So for mammals that eat green plant tissue, our pancreatic lipases cleave the fatty acids from the MGDG in the plant material we are digesting to give beta-galactosyl glycerol...8
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Yesterday morning I was going over my notes for class and had maybe 10 min to kill before I had to walk across campus to teach, so I wrote this ultra niche geeky thread, and now it’s been seen by almost 50,000 people and…c’mon. That’s just hilarious and weird 😂
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A week ago it was snowing lightly in Lincoln so I asked a few students in my
@UNLMicro
BIOS 312 course to take MEA plates outside to catch a few snowflakes. Results after a week at room temp in my office:
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A very on-point critique of “effective altruism” that I wish people like
@tylercowen
and others would read and amplify, instead of acting like EA is…a real thing. It’s just a cult. And as someone who grew up Southern Baptist, I know a cult when I see one.
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It’s Friday after a long week and I just wanna give a shoutout to my favorite model organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Even when they give weird results in the lab, I can take solace in their major fermentation product, so it’s hard to be mad...
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I recognize this a parody account but this is the exact guidance we were given today, so we’re at the point where the distinction between parody and reality is nonexistent.
Please make sure to teach courses in-person unless you test positive for COVID. If you do test positive, you can teach remotely but under no circumstances should you cancel class. Thanks!
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Odd urge to reach out to Burning Man attendees and ask for Black Rock Desert mud to culture polyextremoohililc black fungi and symbionts.
If you’re there, and can ship a couple bottles of mud to Nebraska, let me know!!!
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Here’s more DNA lore: Guanine. IUPAC name: 2-amino-1,9-dihydro-6H-purin-6-one.. So what’s the root of the common name?
Guanine…guano…
Yeah, the first person to identify guanine was Julius Unger, 1846, who isolated it from the accumulated droppings of sea birds, aka guano!
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...because it's the Na+ salt of the nucleic acid from the thymus of slaughtered beef cattle. Cheap, abundant, soft and spongy, easy to purify DNA from with the tools at the time. Perfect starting material!
So yes, Rosalind Franklin's famous photos were of crystalline 🐮 DNA.
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It’s taken me 12 years of undergraduate teaching to realize this, but students, in their math classes, are not being taught how to think about logarithmic functions in a useful way. 1/
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As someone who has been enmeshed in plant biotech AND cancer biology AND lipid metabolism in both plants and animals for a quarter century, this makes EVEN ME cringe at the unsubstantiated claims and overselling of the promise of plant biotechnology.
Yesterday was a historic day in plant biotech: a purple tomato engineered with high antioxidants was approved by
@USDA
@BigPurpleTomato
helps prevent cardiovascular disease and fight cancer in humans.
This approval under new regulation ushers in a new era for plant synbio!
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...which then binds the Lac repressor, causing it to lose affinity for the Lac operator and allow ⬆️ transcription in concert with the cAMP bound form of the catabolite activator protein (CAP). And based on Jacob and Monod and others, that's basically consistent and true...3
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Wow I got a couple hundred new followers from my tweet about quirks of the lac operon so…uhh…welcome I guess? I also post about gardening and wiener dogs, which are my 2 other main interests. Microbiology, hot peppers, basil, tomatoes, Dachshunds. I contain multitudes!
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This might get me cancelled but here goes:
Our funding woes would go away if we simply disallowed faculty salary from being paid with grant money.
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I should find a buddy in the math dept. to teach a course in our 3-week January session entitled “Logarithms for biologists and biochemists.”
End rant 😬😂 5/5
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2018 was the wildest and craziest year of my life, filled with some very high highs and still more very low lows. But instead of cursing this year from hell, I’m celebrating it by baking a cherry pie. And if there’s a soggy bottom? I really don’t care 🤷♂️
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If this kid doesn’t become an ecologist I’ll be shocked. She’s basically been doing a frog census in the pond out back.
And I’m happy to report we do see WAAAAAY more frogs this summer!
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@faither_
@botaneu_
@TiayanaMogensen
Too bad mine are females and don’t have the massive mandibles.
Oh and they’ve been dead for 20 years.
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.
@NatureNews
Some dilution spot tests from a drug resistance screen in yeast
#ShowUsYourScience
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Student: “So when do you think you’ll have our exams graded”
Me: “Well my kids are out of school so I’ll have them in the office this afternoon, but I’ll try to make some progress.”
2 hours later... Butterflies colored: numerous. Exams graded: zilch.
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Still proud of my restoration job on my wife’s grandma’s vintage lava lamp from the mid-60s. It was a mess of crystalline wax that wouldn’t flow, and the water was super cloudy. So I added back some CH2Cl2 and made fresh saline to get the density just right and BOOM! It works!
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@DrRubidium
Or you could play a Gordon Ramsay like character and come to my lab and tell me what a shitty PI I am. "Laboratory Nightmares"
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Does anyone know of a plant species that can't be grown aseptically/gnotobiotically? I.e. a plant for which there is some essential component of its microbiome that is vertically transmitted seed-to-seed and essential for growth?
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Here’s a heretical thought: any grant we receive has a ~50% facilities and administration (F&A) charge that goes to the university. Why not charge a similar fee for “boosters” donating to the athletic program. You donate $150? $50 goes to support teaching and research. Fair?
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Wait til we get to the question of whether we actually got power, poison, pain, and joy inside our DNA...
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@PMF_UNLBiotech
Thankfully, his species is not susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 since they don’t express a compatible ACE2 receptor in their airway epithelium. I cleared it with EHS first.
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@DeanoftWorld
@edburmila
Yes, our Brenda was Tammy, who recently retired. I think she may have actually helped hide some bodies, since she claimed that certain faculty were afraid to cross her since she knew “where the bodies are buried.”
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Hey! You looking for a job? Do you know someone who is?
@UNLsbs
is initiating a search for a TT Asst Prof position as part of a cluster of hires in the broad area of “genes, genomes, and evolution.”
Particularly interested in folks doing experimental evolution or… 1/2
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As I was leaving the lecture hall after giving Exam 1 to my
@UNLMicro
students this morning, my friend
@Rebecca_Roston
was getting ready to give the first
@UNL_Biochem
exam. I said “give me one of those” and then sat down and took the exam. And she graded it. Tough, but fair!
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CC
@Rebecca_Roston
@Evan_LaBrant
@zach_shomo
@ecahoon2
@UNL_PSI
@PlantsRChemists
@ChBenning
and whole bunch of people I
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Spent a lot of time over the last 20 years thinking about the structure of this protein and trying off and on to express and purify it, but never succeeded, and certainly gave up hope on an X-ray structure long ago.
But then AlphaFold2 happened and now here we are!
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I’m now fairly well convinced that this was a biofilm of the SCOBY (symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast) aka the “mother” that’s used for fermenting the grape must into vinegar. I don’t use balsamic a lot, so this had probably sat for 6 months or more.
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This reminds me of my first year in this job. I got a P-card tied to my startup and grant accounts. One time, I bought toothpicks and cornstarch from a grocery store for standard microbiology protocols, media, etc., and was questioned for impropriety…. 1/n
I love how my employers default position whenever I have to do work-related travel is that I'm trying to defraud them.
It's especially lovely since every single instance of fraud i'm aware of has been perpetrated by an administrator.
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Back to my HS biology class: out of 28 students, 26 brought their Bibles to the creation/evolution debate. Only my friend Jake and I defended the Darwinian position.
Jake is now a science communicator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And I’m a biology prof.
3/
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Just saw this in the stairwell adjacent to my office. Did someone have a grad student who was acting up?
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This is an example of what it looked like 48 hours later. The students and I were stunned!
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I opened Twitter this morning and it threw a bunch of balloons at me and I was totally confused. I reloaded it three times, same result.
Then I realized oh yeah, I’m 46 today 😂🎂
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Hi folks: I'm currently the Chair of the Graduate Committee in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. To help our grad students with networking and professional development in the time of COVID and beyond, I am asking for your assistance. (1/n)
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Congrats to
@TheErinCarr
on her successful comprehensive exam and
@vt_jithesh
on successful defense of his PhD dissertation. Great day for the lab!
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Oh nice, I see the "science has to be your passion" versus "science is just a job" argument has popped up again. I guess I have a weird relationship with this evergreen spat, since I grew up on a farm, and "work/life balance" was not a concept I ever thought of growing up...
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@faither_
@botaneu_
@TiayanaMogensen
I also didn't realize, until I looked at this picture, that they've been holding hands (or rather terminal tarsal segments) for all that time. So, yes, they may have been dead and pinned and on my office wall for years, but at least they're not alone...
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It’s grad school application/recruitment season and you, potential student, might wonder: what are the perks of having me as an advisor or a member of your committee? Well, for one: bunny sitting services over holiday break.
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Working on this module about the lac operon and galactolipids for my classes and posting about it on here yesterday was very therapeutic. My dad passed away 4 years ago yesterday. I didn't really think about it much the first 3 years, but it's really hit me hard this week...1
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We are great apes who learned to communicate verbally and use tools very effectively. When you interpret human societal behavior in that framework, things make a whole lot more sense.
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George joins older brother Frank to bring our wiener dog pack to its maximum allowable size (n=2). He's been with us for less than 10 hours but I can already confirm he is a very good boy!
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I’m going to start our next manuscript like my son started his frog research paper...
”Sit down and relax, reviewer 2, because you won’t be able to stop reading about this fantastic lipid analysis!”
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Hey all, my 6th grader took a “design thinking” course last semester and got really good at CAD-based 3D modeling and now wants to start a business designing and printing small lab items. I suggested a magnetic bead concentrator to start…any other ideas?
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