Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

🔬First method-focused work from our lab is just out in Cell Reports Methods 🎉
Interested in multicolor SMLM? Check the open-access final version of Karoline Friedl's PhD work, with Sandrine Lévêque-Fort's lab and the Abbelight gang
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-methods/fulltext/S2667-2375(23)00215-1

Nothing destroys a graduate career faster than help avoidance.

For all the folks starting their #PhD (or their master thesis) today - a reminder why your PhD advisor can solve a problem so "easily" ...

#astrodon #academia #AcademiChatter #research

New @biorxivpreprint manuscript from my lab that sheds light on part of the dark genome, unannotated or poorly annotated genes in the genome. In it, we show that the highly conserved HEATR5 protein is a component of two biochemically distinct protein complexes.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.24.554671v2

If you are a white leftist and you talk “both parties are the same they are both capitalist” you will loose most of your black audience. I think it ought to be obvious that this isn’t because blackfolks love Democrats (in most cases, there is always someone being simple in any group) —no. it’s because the difference between the parties is material and obvious and these are unstable times.

When I hear such talk I wonder if the speaker is working on voter suppression.

Fellow professors, if you're teaching an introductory course in graduate school, set aside some class time early in the semester for students to discuss their transition to your program. You'll find that they're struggling far more than you probably realized. You won't be able to solve all their problems, but opening space for them to voice their issues is more powerful than you can imagine.

#AcademicChatter #AcademicMastodon

@askennard @rspfau @lzvolk

Best advice. Read the pipettor manual they are actually amazing resources.

Eg:
'To attain maximum accuracy, set volume must be approached from a higher value. If the desired value is lower than the previous volume, adjust the value to 1/3 turn above the required setting..."

Also these two pages:

@rspfau @lzvolk @askennard

Absolutely! One thing I do now with everyone who joins my lab (even postdocs) is to do a how-to pipette session.

I think many of my early grad school failures were due to problems with pipetting.

I've started adding in, make sure to wear your glasses if you need them. Until I started needing reading glasses, I did not realize how much being able to see well is part of good pipetting. Now I realize that some ppl's struggles come from vision issues.

I strongly recommend this scholarly analysis of arguments over the status of the Neutral Theory

The sourcing is excellent, the logic is clear, and the analysis has a practical focus on facilitating science by achieving clarity (rather than adopting a partisan slant)

A minor disagreement: "The phrase ‘non-Darwinian evolution’ is a misnomer" (conclusion #6) is not justified in the text and is IMHO plainly wrong

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.13010?af=R

I saw a microbiologist today.

Much bigger than I expected.

@ricci You must have ordered that out of the back of my favorite book:

Want to know what my research is about? Follow this thread 🧵 based on a 10min talk I've drawn for a meeting.

The talk was aimed at non-specialist space science colleagues (not the general public!). The slides were built up step by step, but I'm omitting this here & showing only the final graphs, less this becomes a 34-part thread. 11 is plenty enough!

So: "Understanding Winds of Massive Stars Using High Mass X-ray Binaries"

#astrodon #XraysAreTheBestRays #SciArt #scicomm #VicisAstro
1/11

@askennard

This is an excellent point.

Two related points:

Ergonomics with benchwork. Mostly addressed only after an injury and it's too late. My second rotation was PI was obsessive about people's posture using the microscope because her first student slipped a disc due to bad microscope posture.

I encourage mise en place style of benchwork, by which I mean everything has a specific location that makes sense for the workflow.

It reduces errors and allows some gracefulness.

With the start of the academic year, I want to repost my expert learning article. Soon, graduate students will start their first lab rotations. A lucky few will walk in, and things will work seemingly magically on day one. For most, this marks the start of a sometimes arduous journey of learning to be an expert experimentalist. As a PI, have you ever wondered how to make this journey less arduous? 1/🧵

https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/mbc.E22-11-0517

#Mentoring #AcademicLife #LabLife #GraduateSchool #GradSchool #PhD

@RickiTarr @AirlockDoc Oooh! Storytime!

When I was a little Lana The Musician, one of my heroes was Yo-yo Ma. Growing up in a tiny little backwater town in Kansas, though, my only real contact with him were his albums. I would listen to them on rotation literally all day long in my pocket DiscMan. (That'll tell you how old I am!)

Well, one day I found out he was actually coming into town to play as the featured soloist with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. I was over the moon with excitement! I had been volunteering at WSO for the last couple of years, because they allowed you to sit in and listen to the symphony when you were done taking tickets and opening/closing doors. So I was determined to go usher for his performance.

The day came, and the house was packed. I could barely contain myself. Yo-yo was actually here! In the same building! Then disaster struck! Try as I might, I could not find an empty seat anywhere in the theatre!

🧵/1 for the rest of the story

Happy (or not?) #MicroscopyMonday!
I made a chart out of all the amoeba faces I've found to put on the lab fridge. Unfortunately, happy faces are not an observable phenotype for Naegleria.

Happy Monday again, #ScienceMastodon! The first Research Highlight from JCS Issue 16 features a paper from Toshiyuki Oda and colleagues at the Universities of Yamanashi and Tokyo, using the unicellular algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to break down roles of tubulin modifications in ciliary/flagellar motility. #CellBiology #microtubules #flagellates

Roles of ciliary tubulin PTMs in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/136/16/e136_e1601/325932/Roles-of-ciliary-tubulin-PTMs-in-Chlamydomonas

Looking around for something to better teach the Linux command line.
I found bashcrawl, a dungeon-crawler that works on the command line! Every room is a directory, scrolls are textfiles, and your inventory is kept in environment variables. Such a cool idea!

https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl

Golden Gate Audubon Society, having ditched name over racism, settles on new one

California’s largest bird society, the Golden Gate Audubon Society, was renamed the Golden Gate Bird Alliance last night in an effort to sever its ties to John James Audubon, a 19th-century ornithologist who also has a documented history of racial discrimination and slaveholding. “I think this is a great step forward for us and a new chapter in our organizational history,” said Glenn Phillips, executive director of the newly christened Golden Gate Bird Alliance.

https://missionlocal.org/2023/08/golden-gate-audubon-society-having-ditched-name-over-racism-settles-on-new-one/