Is this thing on?

I realized I have not updated this blog in a good long while. Life comes at you fast ya know, but I’m trying to be better about screaming into this particular void.

Today was a good day to be a worm scientist :) The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. This is the 4th Nobel Prize to be awarded to researchers studying C. elegans.

This semester I’m co-teaching an upper-division undergrad class called Advanced Eukaryotic Genetics where we learn about Biology’s “Great Experiments” (namely, the ones that changed the field and/or won the Nobel and how it changed the way that we think) and then we try to recreate that experiment in lab, for the most part with C. elegans nematodes! For instance, 2 weeks ago we learned about Sturtevant’s mapping experiments in Drosophila in lecture and then in lab we conducted a three-point cross in C. elegans to map where on chromosome IV bli-6 is relative to two other genes: unc-5 and dpy-20. And last week we learned about genetic screens and complementation testing in lecture, and in lab we performed a Dpy complementation test! More on this class later because I have a lot of thoughts + feelings about it !!

This is all to say: this week in lecture I’m supposed to be covering ~~ suppression screens ~~ but I’m halfway tempted to take a little detour/aside on why today’s Nobel announcement is so exciting!

In other non-nobel news, we just wrapped up a successful Outreach day down at the Great Salt Lake! I teamed up with the Salt Lake Center for Science Education, a charter high school in Rose Park, Utah for a day of learning about the lake! Morgan (a new grad student in the Werner lab!) and I joined a small team of 10th grade teachers and the entire 10th grade (2 buses and 2 vans, >100 students) for a field trip at Ladyfinger Point on Oct 7th, 2024.

The team included Maryanne (Psychology), Shea (Chemistry), Emma (Mathematics) and Annie (Art, also the Assistant Director of Learning and Engagement, Utah Museum of Fine Arts). Together we led the students through 4 different stations throughout the day. Each station took about 1 hour.

Annie led the students in making impressionist paintings of the lake.