Periodic updates on life, mostly related to my research group and teaching at Caltech.
Changing of the guard
This month our longtime laboratory manager, Ms. Lichun Zhang, departed to move with her family to Chicago. Her husband is now working for Agilent, and she will be looking for a new laboratory position there. Anyone in Chicago looking for an awesome lab manager? We will miss her. Fortunately for us, we've just hired a new replacement, Dr. Fenfang Wu. Fenfang comes to us from Teledyne, where she worked on gas analyzers in their testing and calibration group. Before that she was a postdoc at Caltech in the Kellogg Radiation Lab, and has a PhD in neutrino physics from UC Irvine. We've agreed to teach her organic geochemistry if she can explain the whole Higgs Boson thing to us... Welcome Fenfang, and good luck Lichun with your new life in the Windy City!
Auf Wiedersehen Eva
Eva Niedermeyer has been working in my labs at Caltech -- first as a visitor during her PhD, and later as a postdoc -- for almost 4 years now. Alas, she has finally finished her work here and moves on to the next big thing. While at Caltech, Eva employed compound-specific D/H measurements of leaf waxes contained in marine sediment cores to investigate changes in tropical climate and hydrology. She first worked on cores collected off the western coast of Senegal to produce a 44,000 year record of variations in the West-African monsoon. The results, published in Quaternary Science Reviews (pdf), show that there were two significantly wetter periods in western Africa from 38-28 and 15-4 kyr, and that these intervals correspond to periods of maximum summer insolation. Next, as a postdoc, she has worked on several cores from western Sumatra, producing a 24,000-year record of precipitation intensity. Remarkably, in this part of the world there appears to have been relatively little change in precipitation intensity over the last glacial/interglacial transition, a finding that contrasts markedly with stalagmite records from further east in Indonesia. A manuscript with these results is currently in review.
Eva moves on to the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, where she will be using the tools of isotope biogeochemistry to study the affects of climate change on plant ecology, as well as continuing to work on proxy records of paleoclimate. You can read more on her home page.
A new cave
Last summer, the ESE option finished moving into its newly renovated home in Linde + Robinson Hall. Although we're sad to see some of our colleagues move (albeit just next door), this has a silver lining for us: some of the vacated lab space has now been renovated as a new instrument lab for geochemistry. We have recently moved all of our instrumentation into the new lab, and at over 1000 square feet this more than triples our previous analytical space. What's more, it has big windows! Features of the new lab (for those gear-heads among you) include a dedicated instrumentation electrical busway protected by a massive power conditioner; hard-plumbed gas lines (11 in total) that lead to a tank farm in the hallway, and with 5 separate 'stations' for connecting instruments; a dedicated and fire-walled local area network for all the lab computers, so that they can share data without outside intrusion (we hope); and a dedicated workstation/server running 3 virtual WindowsXP machines that can be accessed remotely for data processing. Stop by and see it sometime.
West end of the lab. Look at all those windows...
East end of the lab.
OGD Best Paper
We've just learned that our paper on "Identification of a methylase required for 2-methylhopanoid production..." has been selected as the Organic Geochemistry Division's 2010 Best Paper. Normally I would say this is not the kind of thing that should be boasted about on a website. But in this case I can take very little of the credit -- that goes to Paula Welander and Maureen Coleman, the two postdocs who did all the hard work on this paper. So congrat's to them. It is really a beautiful piece of work, and reports the existence of a single gene (at least in Rhodopseudomonas palustris) that governs synthesis of 2-methylhopanoids, a group of biomarker compounds that play a key part in our studies of life on the ancient Earth. They then go on to show that while that gene is present in many cyanobacteria, it is also present in many Proteobacteria as well. Thus we may have to think even harder about whether we should really attribute 2-methylhopanes from ancient rocks exclusively to cyanobacteria. Congratulations, Paula and Maureen!
Geobiology Course, 2011
Well, the International Geobiology Course has wrapped up another successful year. This year we went to Yellowstone N.P. (and saw a really BIG grizzly bear), saw the Green River Formation in southern Wyoming, extracted DNA at the Colorado School of Mines, extracted lipids and other things at Caltech, and spent 10 days on Catalina at the Wrigley Marine Labs. All things considered, it was a huge success and everyone (at least the instructors) had a blast. Nobody got eaten by a bear. This year we "did lipids" again, but with a twist: we looked for hopanoids in the lipid extracts from mats, and for the biosynthetic genes in the DNA. While it was not quite an overwhelming success, we did find some of both -- look for an update from the course students at AGU. We're already looking forward to next year, so if you are interested in participating send me an email. Even better, send one to the course directors: Frank Corsetti at USC, and John Spear at Colorado School of Mines. And while you're at it, thank them for running such a spectacular summer course!