The Lenski Lab Health Plan for the New Coronavirus Outbreak

The future is unknown, as it always is.  We do know that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is spreading around the globe, but we don’t know how many people will be infected.  Some experts are predicting that something like half of the adult population will be infected, although not all at the same time.  We also know that many cases are relatively mild (like a cold or the usual flu), and some infections may be asymptomatic. However, we also know that some other cases—perhaps 20% or so—are very serious, and some of those are life-threatening.

See MSU’s coronavirus page for University policy, information, and advice.

What can we do, as individuals and a lab group, to protect ourselves, our families, each other, our communities, and our research?  Here are my current thoughts, with an emphasis on activities related to our laboratory and our academic setting.

1/ If you haven’t done so already, get your flu shot. It won’t protect against the coronavirus, and it doesn’t provide perfect protection against the influenza virus, but it will reduce the chance of getting the flu (and save health-care resources for others in need).

2/ Make sure you and your household are prepared for a period of self-isolation or quarantine lasting 2 weeks, or perhaps longer.  This means stocking up on food staples and, importantly, any medicines that you and your household need.  For medicines, I suggest having at least a full month’s supply, maybe longer, in case there are disruptions to availability.  Talk to your doctor about extending prescriptions or any other special needs you might have.

3/ If you develop symptoms of a cold or flu—even mild symptoms—please stay at home and don’t come into the office or the lab.  We don’t want you to spread the infection.  Just email the group list to let us know what’s up, and work from home on your writing and reading if you feel up to it. You won’t impress me, or anyone, by trying to work while you’re sick.

4/ If a member of your household becomes ill, see and follow point 3 above.

5/ Let’s all start practicing more restrained physical interactions, and thus set good examples not only among ourselves but also for our colleagues and friends. That means skipping hugs and handshakes, for the time being.  Instead, you might put your own hands together and bow your head slightly to greet or congratulate someone. Or maybe an elbow bump, if you really must make contact.  Foot bumps are apparently another new thing, too.

6/ Be prepared to stop your lab work on short notice.  In the meantime, I guess March might be a good time to get a week-long or two-week experiment done, before the epidemic grows too large (if it does).  However, I suggest holding off, for the time being, on any plan to start a large and/or long experiment.

7/ Speaking of long experiments, you will recall that we have a certain long-term experiment in our lab.  The LTEE will soon hit 73,500 generations, at which time the samples will be frozen as usual.  After that date, I’d like population samples to be frozen more often, say, every 2 or 3 weeks.  Just freeze away a copy of each population (no need to plate cells)—basically, so we have samples to restart in the event that people get sick, or if the university should at some point curtail certain activities for a while.

8/ Be prepared to cancel your attendance at scientific conferences and other academic or social events as new information arises. Even if an event organizer decides to push ahead, you don’t have to go if you feel it is risky for you personally. As an aside, I recommend delaying purchases of airfares until an event is closer in time, given the current uncertainty.  (Refundable tickets on most airlines are very expensive, and other tickets have restrictions.)  Hotel reservations can usually be cancelled on shorter notice (a day or week, check to be sure), but not if they were booked through a discounter.

9/ And maybe the hardest advice of all is to practice good personal hygiene. Cover your mouth with your forearm or the inside of your elbow when you cough or sneeze unexpectedly.  (If you know you’re sick, then you should have disposable tissues handy. Use those to cover your nose and mouth completely, and dispose of a tissue after one use.) If you find yourself coughing or sneezing repeatedly, see point 3 above. Wash your hands thoroughly [Click that link, with the sound on, and stay for the end!] after you’ve touched shared surfaces, especially before eating. And most difficult of all, avoid touching your own face.  This coronavirus can survive for hours as tiny droplets on surfaces, which we may inadvertently touch (“fomite transmission”). Then, when we touch our mouth, nose, or eyes, we can infect ourselves.

10/ ADDED: Follow the news, and get your news from trustworthy, reliable sources. If it becomes clear that infections are spreading locally, or even if you are just concerned about that possibility, then avoid crowded public venues. (But this does not mean that you should follow the news obsessively, as that can be exhausting. h/t Carl Bergstrom.)

11/ ADDED: If you do isolate yourself, whether because of illness or concern, make sure to maintain frequent social contact with your family, friends, and the lab via phone, email, or whatever works best for you. Don’t let physical isolation and loneliness make you feel miserable. We are all stronger together, even if we might have to be physically apart.

12/ ADDED: Please read these Words of Wisdom, regarding preparedness for infectious disease outbreaks, from Michael Leavitt, a former Secretary of Health and Human Services.

13/ ADDED:  This one is for those of you in science or other relevant scholarly fields.  Do you have data in your lab notebooks and/or on computers accessible only in the lab?  Are the datasets ones that you might need for your analyses and writing if, say, you end up confined at home for a few weeks?  If so, I recommend that you copy it (but only if it’s allowed in the case of certain types of sensitive data!) by scanning it and/or copying it to your personal computer. That way, you can use it while working from home if you decide, or are required, to do so.

Take care everyone.  Please let me know of any errors, omissions, and practical suggestions.

 

 

 

Advertisement

Freezer Burn

One of the more challenging aspects of running a microbiology lab, in my opinion, is freezer management.  There’s a lot to keep track of, both in terms of quantity and quality.  My lab team and I take great pride in the quality control of our work that has allowed us, for example, to keep the LTEE running for over 30 years and 70,000 generations without contamination.  Or rather, as I’ve posted before, we’ve had occasional accidents including cross-contamination of the replicate lines, but we’ve caught those mistakes and, using frozen samples, restarted as needed to keep things going smoothly and cleanly.

With my lab group now running for ~34 years (I started at UCI in 1985), and with so many hard-working students and postdocs, we’ve filled up lots of –80C freezers.  And that’s despite shipping many strains to scientific collaborators and former lab members who’ve continued to work on the various projects—the LTEE is only one (albeit the longest) of the many projects we’ve done in my lab.  Adding to the storage challenge, we’ve got duplicates of most samples in case we have a problem with the primary sample (say, someone drops a vial on the floor).  Also, to avoid compromising our primary or backup samples, I ask that everyone who plans to use any sample (usually a set of many samples) more than once make his or her own working copies of the samples.

And freezers sometimes fail, despite our best efforts to maintain them in tip-top shape.  So over the years, I’ve always tried to keep a freezer’s worth of spare capacity across our multiple freezers, so when one fails, everything can be moved into a functioning freezer.

On Sunday, one of our workhorse freezers failed. Most of our freezers have alarms that send out an email alert to members of the lab that something is amiss.  This one did not (oops!), but fortunately undergraduate Jessica Baxter (working hard even on the weekend), noticed that it had “warmed up” to –40C or so.  I was off visiting grandkids, but Jessica was able to reach Devin Lake, who manages the lab’s operations extremely well, even as he does double-duty as a grad student.  Devin and Jessica were able to find enough spare capacity to get everything into one of the surviving freezers, so nothing was lost.

But that meant we had no more spare capacity.  We can buy a new freezer, although my experience (and hearing about many other failures) is that they don’t make them like they used to.  And what if another freezer were to fail before we got a new one?

I knew we had many freezer racks full of now-unimportant samples—working copies made by people who’ve left the lab, as well as samples from abandoned experiments and various long-ago projects that won’t be revisited.  So I asked Devin to look through the freezers for the identifiers on various racks (besides the LTEE and any associated with current lab members) that would give me ideas of what we could discard to free up some space that we will need for ongoing projects … as well as the possibility of another freezer failure.  (But please not that!  I’m not trying to tempt fate—I just want to be prepared.)  It turns out there were lots of possibilities, so Devin and I spent a couple of hours checking boxes and then removing about 20 freezer racks, most holding 6 to 10 boxes, and most of those with dozens of small vials, each holding many millions or even billions of bacterial cells.  Seeing the names of former lab members on the boxes, and the numbers on all those vials, was a humbling reminder of all the hard work that so many have done over the years.  Devin carted three loads of discards down to one of our workrooms, where hardworking tech John Baltusis emptied each box and prepared the vials for the sterilization (autoclaving at high temperature) that’s required before they can be discarded.

Thanks to the hard work of Jessica, Devin, and John, the lab avoided any setback. In fact, our freezer collection is now a little more manageable than it was before.

[Devin Lake, in front, with one of three cartloads of samples to discard, while John Baltusis removes the samples from one box before autoclaving.]

 

Half Life

Today marks a unique day for the LTEE and me.

The LTEE started on February 17, 1988.  That was 11,517 days ago.

I was born on August 13, 1956.  That was 23,034 days ago.

That means that the LTEE is now half as old as I am.

To put it another way, I’ve spent half a lifetime on the LTEE.

Well, that’s not quite the right way to put it, since I’ve done a few other things during that time. Like raising a family—with a lot of help.  And a lot of other science, also with a lot of help, not to mention all the work of so many students and collaborators on the LTEE itself.

And unlike a radioactive isotope, the bacteria haven’t been decaying—they’ve been getting better and better at living in their flask-worlds.

My hope is that this long-term evolution experiment will continue for a long time. A very long time. For a lot longer than my own lifetime.

Here are a couple of photos from around the time the LTEE started. The first one shows Madeleine and me camping near Joshua Tree National Park in the summer of 1987, at the annual retreat of the UC-Irvine EEB department, and only a couple months before the birth of our youngest. The next one shows me snuggling with my three kids in early 1989.

How time flies. Luckily, though, I get to snuggle with my three grandkids now.

Bacterial generations. Human generations. Growing, evolving, and learning.

 

 

 

 

Coach Izzo and me

Chalk up another great year for the Michigan State men’s basketball team and coach Tom Izzo. The Spartans were co-champions of the Big10 and won the conference’s grueling tournament. And in the NCAA’s March Madness, they made it all the way to the Final Four, knocking out the top-seeded team in the process.

Being a fan of this team got me thinking: Coach and I have a lot in common. We’ve both been doing our jobs, mostly at MSU, for a long time. Coach Izzo came here as a part-time assistant in 1983, becoming head coach in 1995. I was on the faculty at UC-Irvine starting in 1985, before moving here in 1991.

But the real similarities are deeper and more important:

First and foremost, we’ve both been fortunate to be surrounded by talented and hard-working students who listen to our ideas, experiment with them, develop them in their own ways, and translate them into meaningful outcomes—winning big games and making new discoveries.

That’s not to say there aren’t frustrations along the way: games lost, grants and papers rejected, grinding practice on the court and repetition in the lab, and even occasional conflicts. But our students are usually resilient—they overcome those setbacks and frustrations, and they go on to productive lives as players and coaches, researchers and teachers, and other careers as well.

We also both had mentors who helped us start our own careers. In Coach Izzo’s case, one mentor was Jud Heathcote, the previous head coach who hired him as an assistant. My mentors included my doctoral advisor, Nelson Hairston, and my postdoctoral supervisor, Bruce Levin. Coach Izzo and I also had friends who helped shape our careers early on: Steve Mariucci, who went on to become an NFL coach; and Phil Service, who did important work on life-history evolution.

Coach Izzo and I also both benefitted, I think, from early successes—again, largely due to our students—that helped establish our reputations, allowing us to retain our jobs and thrive by recruiting more talented, hard-working students. For Tom Izzo, it was players like Mateen Cleaves, Charlie Bell, and Mo Peterson who took the Spartans to the Sweet 16 in his 3^rd year as head coach and to the Final Four the next year, and who won the 1999-2000 National Championship. For me, the early students included Judy Bouma, Felisa Smith, John Mittler, Mike Travisano, Paul Turner, and Farida Vasi, and postdocs Toai Nguyen and Valeria Souza.

Coach Izzo has also had assistant coaches and staff, who I imagine do a lot of the heavy lifting. While some might eventually become head coaches of their own teams, many others labor in relative obscurity. In a similar vein, I’ve had outstanding lab managers including Sue Simpson, Lynette Ekunwe, and—for over 20 years, before retiring last year—Neerja Hajela.

Coach Izzo and I have both had deep benches—students who helped the team succeed without being in the limelight themselves. For Coach Izzo, they include the walk-ons and others who see limited action in games, but who compete against the starters every day in practice, helping everyone become even better. I think of three undergraduates who joined my lab when it was just getting started in Irvine (all Vietnamese refugees, by the way) who asked if they could work in my lab. Trinh Nguyen, Quang Phan, and Loan Duong prepared media and performed experiments like some incredible three-brained, six-handed machine, setting a high standard for everyone who followed in their footsteps.

Coach Izzo and I are nearly the same age. Retirement might be easier, but neither of us is ready for that. It’s too much fun when you’ve got talent to encourage and guide like Cassius Winston, Joshua Langford, Nick Ward, Xavier Tillman, and Aaron Henry—and on my team Jay Bundy, Kyle Card, Nkrumah Grant, Minako Izutsu, and Devin Lake.

Of course, there’s more that Coach Izzo and I have in common—we were lucky to be born into circumstances that allowed us to pursue our dreams without the obstacles that many others face.

Last but not least, Coach Izzo and I have had supportive partners who’ve accepted our peculiar obsessions and the long hours and frequent travel that our work entails.

Go Green! Go Students!!