Wayne Riekhof

Lucy and her mantis friend at age 5, and hissing cockroach friends at age 13… I think she may have inherited the entomologist gene from me!

The many faces of my little red weenie boy, George, who is 5 years old today!

Sometimes I wonder how all the different coat colors and patterns in, say, Dachshunds came to be. Then I see posts like the one below and it’s like “oh, yeah, one popped up in a litter randomly and was selected.”

To paraphrase Monod: What‘s true of Lima beans is true of wiener dogs…

No harm other than a strip of sod torn out, but the chunks of wheel and body panel they left in the yard after fleeing on the rim…well, we’re glad no one was hurt 😬

The person who lost control of their car and drove through my yard late Wednesday did manage to miss the 12-foot skeletons and for that, I am grateful 🙏

George Beadle is kneeling with the dog. This was just before he went to work with Ed Tatum. Charles Burnham is top left, went on to U of Minnesota and worked on cereal breeding of various sorts.

Don’t forget George Beadle and the dog (whose name I used to know but have forgotten)

Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year

Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year https://theonion.com/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates-another-success-1819569379/

Wanna know how I know I’m making an impact? Anonymous students have started to tell jokes I make in class back to me on the whiteboard on my office door… 🤓 🧪 😂

Apple pie, golden brown from cinnamon and the Maillard reaction, sitting on a stovetop to cool.

Kitchen smells pretty good right now. Whole house, actually!

There used to be a fast neutron source in the basement of the PRL, and a bunch of different high specific activity radionuclides related to nuclear weapons testing, but they may have been disposed of in the 80’s or 90’s.

Reposting this to remind me to talk about it in class…Today was on nitrogen fixing bacteria that live in the fungus gardens of leaf cutter ants.

So I guess this could be part of the microbial physiology physiology course with a strong myrmecological theme…

Jeff Tweedy, wearing clear-framed glasses and a plaid shirt. A headline reads: "How Jeff Tweedy Made a New Magnum Opus." Photo by Lyndon French for The New York Times

“Twilight Override,” the latest solo project by Jeff Tweedy, who leads the long-running band Wilco, is a triple album that earns every minute. “I just thought that it flies in the face of a culture that’s gotten faster, more surface level,” he said. nyti.ms/4ngMQgu

Yet again, never having learned how to swim remains a net positive as far as I’m concerned.

Last of the hot peppers for the season! Scotch Bonnet, Habenero, Jalapeño, and Habenada (a mutant Habenero that has a defective capsaicin biosynthetic pathway.)

Turning some of these into jam shortly!

I noticed the same thing when I grew some last year, then realized they’re closely related to Hibiscus and it made sense. Can’t go wrong with battered and deep fried okra!

I’ve told students for years now, a good term paper idea for an evolution/pop gen course or a music course (or both!) would be a thorough analysis of the claims in Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” through the lens of genes x environment interactions. There’s a lot to mine, there.

Guess no one in the NYT puzzle writers room has ever force-fed a mouse. Sad.

I think D very narrowly edges out G for me, but a different day might find that switched...

Caveat: this only works in rats that have been engineered to express a cocaine responsive ion channel in the brain. Probably not going to stop a given human from using or help someone get clean any time in the near future...but still very, very cool approach!

Dependency on Medium and Temperature of Cell Size and Chemical Composition during Balanced Growth of Salmonella typhimurium Summary: Ceil mass, the average number of nuclei/cell and the content of RNA and DNA were studied in (Salmonella typhimurium during balanced (steady state) growth in different media. These quantities ...

...I am teaching this semester (as BIOS 440/840.) So this paper will be the next subject of our tri-weekly Journal Club, every third Friday in the class this semester. A classic, still well worth a read!

www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Very nice writeup on someone I've admired and learned from for many years. I didn't know he had passed until catching up on This Week in Microbiology driving to campus this morning. His 1958 paper on Salmonella growth rates basically founded the formal study of microbial physiology, which...

Festival of capsaicin at the house tonight…

Text from my daughter giving @lukelukeluke.bsky.social vibes 🍄‍🟫🍄🍄‍🟫🍄 😂

True. I’ve been schlepping this around for 25+ years now.

It’s a shame I can’t go back in time like 25 or 30 years and ask the yeast genome sequencing and KO collection folks to use something other than S288c derivatives & designer deletion strains. The BY474x strains suck!

Yeah, still got it! (Doing yeast genetics with my own hands, that is.)

Measuring mutagenesis efficiency by EMS in 2 S. cerevisiae wild-types, by loss of CAN1 function leading to canavanine resistant colonies.

Does the BY474x background have a mismatch repair defect? 🤔

It’s Friday afternoon and I was working in the lab all day and my impulse control was slipping so I gave in. I finally did it. Almost felt like I didn’t have a choice…

I licked a Petri dish!

Stay tuned on Monday to see what grows… 👅 🧪 🦠 🤓

Try course semolina flour for pasta making. It’s just the right size and shape of granules to act like micro ball bearings. And stays slipperier when dampened by the dough.

Not my picture, but this lovely couple are nesting a few blocks from my house, in the woods adjacent to Holmes Lake in Lincoln. Haven't seen any juveniles yet, but here's hoping!