Also: Come to the UW Science Expeditions Campus Open House April 14-16.
Plan your day and find your way with the schedules & maps and exhibit guide available at
https://science.wisc.edu/science-expeditions
The Math: 3 Days + 30 Destinations + 90 Hands-on Exploration Stations + 300 Engaging Scientists = 1 Great Time
“Wednesday Nite @ The Lab” Public Science Talks
Wednesdays at 7pm CT
Room 1111 Genetics Biotech Center, 425 Henry Mall, Madison WI,
or
Zoom at https://go.wisc.edu/240r59
or
Stream at https://www.youtube.com/@wednesdaynitethelab8948
For Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Hi WN@TL Fans,
On March 28, 1911, in a speech in Syracuse, NY, Arthur Brisbane advised his listeners, “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Upon further review, and four years of reflection, Mr. Brisbane raised his estimate by an order of magnitude: “A picture is worth ten thousand words.” I wonder what he might have guesstimated had he seen photos taken with a microscope.
As an undergrad during the Ford administration, I majored in biology and minored in chemistry. I think I used a microscope of some sort in nearly every biology class: a loupe for field work, a stereoscope for identifying insects, a double-barreled microscope for bacteriology and for plant anatomy, an electron microscope for a ‘special topics’ project.
In contrast, I’m trying to remember if I ever used a microscope in any chemistry class; I’m coming up empty-handed. We used optics, including spectroscopy, but that device gave us a curvy line printed on a roll of graph paper, not an image.
I’m not sure when the field of biochemistry started to accept photos of molecules as evidence or insights into the nature of reactions. Certainly X-ray diffraction crystallography was pivotal by April 1953 (lo, these 70 years ago) when the images produced by Rosalind Franklin & RG Gosling, and by Wilkins, Stokes & Wilson, were vital to Watson & Crick arriving at their helical, complementary, anti-parallel model of the structure of double-stranded DNA, as indelibly drawn by Odile Crick. But Rosalind Franklin was a physical chemist, not a biochemist, and Gosling was a physicist.
It’s been enlightening over the recent decades to watch the confluence of optics, microscopy and computational prowess enable biochemists and molecular biologists decipher the structures and monitor the reactions of molecules in test tubes and in cells. The pictures we’ll get to see this Wednesday would likely leave Mr. Brisbane speechless.
-=-=-=
On April 12 Elizabeth Wright of Biochemistry will speak on Cryo-Electron Microscopy.
Description: Elizabeth Wright directs the UW-Madison Cryo-Electron Microscopy Research Center (CEMRC) research facility located in the Hector F. DeLuca Biochemical Sciences Complex on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The UW-Madison CEMRC is dedicated to providing instrumentation, technical assistance, training, and access to cryo-EM for the UW-Madison research community.
The CEMRC manages and operates four cryo-microscopes for data collection by single particle, tomography, and micro-ED. The microscopes are overseen by experienced staff who offer consultation and training in negative-stain and vitrified sample preparation, single particle analysis, tomography, data processing and additional computational support.
The UW-Madison CEMRC welcomes investigators from other universities and industry.
The CEMRC is a cross-campus initiative led by a coalition of partners including the Department of Biochemistry, the School of Medicine and Public Health, the Morgridge Institute for Research, the UW Carbone Cancer Center, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, and the College of Engineering Nanoscale Imaging and Analysis Center.
Bio: Elizabeth Wright received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Emory University. She engineered elastin-mimetic materials that are used for drug delivery and tissue engineering applications. She was a postdoctoral research associate in materials science at the University of Southern California. She was a postdoctoral scholar with Professor Grant Jensen at Caltech where she developed cryo-ET technologies and used cryo-ET to study HIV-1 maturation. She joined Emory University as an Assistant Professor in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016. She moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a full Professor in 2018. Her research program focuses on the development and use of cryo-EM and correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) imaging technologies to determine the native-state structures of several bacterial species, bacteriophages, HIV-1, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), measles virus (MeV), and other host-pathogen systems.
=-=-=-
On Friday April 14 Amy Rosebrough, staff archeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, will give a Special Friday Night Edition of Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, starting at 7:00 pm CT. This is part of UW Science ExpeditionsCampus Open House April 14-16.
Special Location: We’ll have the talk in the Auditorium of the Wisconsin Historical Society on Library Mall.
Title: “Fire, Shipwreck, and Cheese—Wisconsin’s Lost Coastal Communities”
Description: In the mid to late 19th centuries, dozens of small communities sprang up along the eastern shores of Wisconsin, each with its own lake pier and general store. The owners of the piers shipped forest and farm products to Chicago, and supplied incoming settlers with the income and goods they needed to survive.
A Wisconsin Historical Society initiative is exploring the submerged and onshore remains of these lost ports, and tracing the histories of the people and ships that called them home. In the process, a forgotten chapter of Great Lakes history is coming to light. The lost ports tell stories of catastrophic fires, dangerous shoals, runaway horses, gossip columnists, eavesdropping clerks, and lots and lots of cheese. Most importantly, the story of Wisconsin’s lost coastal communities is the story of how Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan’s shoreline was transformed from timberland to today’s farms and cities.
Bio: Dr. Amy Rosebrough is a Staff Archaeologist with the Office of the State Archaeologist at the Wisconsin Historical Society. A native of the Missouri Ozarks, she has long had an interest in burial monuments and archaeology. She is an alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she received her doctorate for region-wide re-analysis of Wisconsin’s effigy mounds and mound builders. She has worked as an archaeologist in the academic, private, and public sectors. In her current position at the Wisconsin Historical Society, she manages archaeological and burial sites data, assists Wisconsin’s citizens with archaeological questions, and serves as a subject matter expert.
=-=–=-=
On April 19 Jessica Hua of Forest & Wildlife Ecology will speak on “Pollutants, Parasites, and You.”
From her website:
-=-=-=
Hope to see you soon—in person, by YouTube livestream or by Zoom —at Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
Tom ZinnenBiotechnology Center & Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H
Please share this missive with your friends & neighbors.
If you’ll be watching the Zoom for the first time, please register for the WN@TL Zoom at go.wisc.edu/240r59.
If you’ve already registered for a previous WN@TL zoom this year, you’re good—you don’t have to register again.
Continue to use the link found in the confirmation message Zoom sent you when you first registered.
WN@TL begins at 7:00pm Central.
You can also watch the web stream at the WN@TL YouTube channel.
UW-Madison: 5.9 million owners, one pretty good public land-grant teaching, research and extension university.
Visit UW-Madison’s science outreach portal at science.wisc.edu for information on the people, places & programs on campus that welcome you to come experience science as exploring the unknown, all year round.
Here are the components of the WN@TL User’s Guide:
1. The live WN@TL seminar, every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, at 7pm CT in Room 1111 Genetics Biotech Center and on Zoom at go.wisc.edu/240r59
2. The WN@TL YouTube channel
3. WN@TL on the University Place broadcast channel of PBS Wisconsin
===
Park for a small fee in Lot 20, 1390 University Avenue, Madison, WI