L.I.T., you ask? Well, that stands for Laboratory of Iron Transport, and it’s where I spend most of my waking hours. In brief, we study how bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes get iron from the environment and “swallow it up.” The metal is indispensable for bacteria as well as all other living organisms to survive, but it is very tricky to obtain. Iron can be compared to money in the sense that everyone who has it tries to protect it from being taken away. However, bacteria developed sophisticated systems to do just that: steal the iron from you and use it to survive. Since all pathogenic bacteria need to obtain iron to cause disease, we hope that our research will lead to the discovery of new weapons to fight infections.
We thought – actually, let me give full credit to Phil for that – he thought it would be fun to walk through the lab and ask what each person was doing, in an informal and fun way. Unfortunately, two of our undergrad students were not available when the video was made: Noah Long and Dallas Hyder. It was tricky enough to get everyone else there at the same time. I think the video turned out pretty good, as it was totally improvised.
Check it out here.
It makes me very sad to see Brittany Nairn, our super star Research Professor, getting ready to leave our group. She is the person who shows up in the video once Phil goes through a closed-door to our darkened “Fluorescence Spectroscopy Room.” We wish she could stay longer as a member of our team, but unfortunately that’s not possible. She will go on to write her own story, and we know she will be successful and happy no matter the path life takes her. Our whole lab will miss her terribly…
CREDITS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Yan Shipelskiy – Graduate student working super hard to develop a full system of evaluation of iron uptake in Gram-positive bacteria
Olivia Eliasson – Undergrad student working with Dr. Nairn to evaluate compounds with anti-bacterial activity linked to blocking of iron uptake
Dr. Somnath Chakravorty – Post-doc who recently joined our lab, working on iron uptake genes from Klebsiella pneumoniae
Aritri Majumdar – Graduate student performing very tricky experiments to evaluate the effect of bacterial membrane integrity on iron uptake
Ashish Somvanshi – Graduate student who just joined our lab, also working on iron uptake by Klebsiella pneumoniae
Dr. Brittany Nairn – Research Professor who joined our lab in August last year, and developed from scratch a whole system to evaluate iron uptake in a pathogen called Acinetobacter baumannii
Dr. Sally Newton – yours truly, molecular biologist by day, food blogger by night. Performing her favorite type of experiment using radioactive iron. Because, you know… some like it hot!
Director, Producer and Narrator, Dr. Phillip Klebba… My favorite scientist in the whole wide world!
Our undergrad student Noah Long, missing from the video, but proudly showing the results of his labor: the best batch of enterobactin ever purified in our lab! How cool is that look?
😉
Before I leave, I invite you to watch this video of Dr. Phil Klebba explaining in more detail the research of our group. Sorry, ladies, he is already taken.
So, so glad I was still attached to my computer when this dropped into my mailbox a few minutes ago: this Saturday afternoon ‘homework’ I completed very happily and shall go back for another look and listen for some things I have to look up later! Lovely to get your ‘night work’ recipes and stories, but this really fascinates and the video has given me a much better idea of where and how you work: you have quite a team there . . . all the best and thanks you SO much!!
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glad you liked it! I edited it to add a short video with Phil’s explanation of our research, I think he did a great job with that! We do have quite a nice team of people working, and what’s even better is the atmosphere is great too… cannot ask for anything more
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I love it! So cool to see where you spend your days 🙂 xx
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I sometimes say that I am married to that piece of equipment you see me using – quite a bit of my time and energy is spent right there, although I don’t always have to work in the dark, only if someone is using the machine that measures fluorescence. It is very sensitive to environmental light.
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Do you, Sally, take this….machine….to be your lawfully wedded….???
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and promise to love it when it performs well or it malfunctions? YESSSSS, I DO!!!!!!
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You really are in love with it!!
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told ya! of course, my Shark vacuum cleaner at home could be jealous, as I often flirt with it and tell him he is the only one as far as machines are concerned… what can I say? I have flaws, you know….
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Ha ha! No?! not you 😉
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Lovely to see your lab and hear my “friends” mentioned….bacterial that is. I work for the ATCC here in the US.
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Ah, the wonderful ATCC! Got many strains from you over the years.. not always cheap, but always trustworthy! Great customer service too..
we did not mention one important friend of yours, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It’s giving us so much grievance that it went unmentioned.. 😉
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Ha ha, that troublesome Ps. I loved reading about your lab.
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This is wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing this.
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so glad you enjoyed it! We certainly had a lot of fun making the video!
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Your work sounds fascinating! Thank you for sharing it.
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Thank you! We definitely love what we do…. (probably the only way to deal with the frustration of research, in which things don’t always go the way we expect)
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