John Wallingford

An iPod playlist gone rogue?

No, it’s the soundtrack of John Wallingford’s developmental biology laboratory on a typically eclectic day.

“My philosophy is to make a lab a very fun place because I need my people to be here all the time,” he says.

Music is a key ingredient in lab fun. It helps the students stay alive while doing painstaking bench work.

“You’re going to be sitting at the microscope for 30 minutes or an hour,” he says. “On a hard day you might sit at the microscope for four hours straight manipulating things. It’s much more fun if there’s some music playing.”

Wallingford’s lab researches embryonic development and it focuses on development of the neural tube from which the spine and brain are formed. That involves close work with early stage embryos.

Wallingford says the lab plays just about anything. Rock and roll is the most-played followed with county-and-western (the Willie Nelson branch) and alt-country.

“We also do a good bit of blues, bluegrass and electronic music as well as some jazz,” he says.

The lab’s music etiquette is pretty basic: “The record played is decided by whomever walks over and turns it on,” Wallingford says. “But technically, everyone has veto power.”

Check the lab’s Web site for its listening list. There’s also a link to the Continental Club.

With long sideburns, mustache and bushy soul patch, Wallingford would fit in on the Austin singer-songwriter circuit. He seems almost as enthusiastic about music as he is about his research.

Some of his favorites are Austin-based Hayes Carll and his album, “Trouble in Mind,” (fantastic, Wallingford says) and a local group called Salesman.

Ryan Gray

“I’m graduating a student who was a guitar player, banjo player, mandolin player, singer and we had a lot of good music,” Wallingford says. “I’m a hack but I like to play and it was fun to have someone who actually can play in the lab.”

So blame graduation, not Yoko, for the breakup of the band.

It’s been a busy spring for Wallingford and his lab.

The graduating musician, Ryan Gray, is taking his new Ph.D. to a post-doc at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Two other Ph.D.s are headed to the University of California, Berkeley and another is staying at Texas. Wallingford’s lab is sending an undergraduate to Berkeley and another to Caltech.

I visited Wallingford and his lab to learn about his research. We’ll post a story about his science in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, post a comment about what you listen while you work.

Dan Bolnick

Dan Bolnick, an assistant professor in the Section of Integrative Biology, is a stickleback scientist who’s starting to use the fish in a new way to research relationships between organisms and parasites.

Bolnick’s work earned him selection as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Early Career Scientist. John Wallingford, an associate professor of molecular cell and developmental biology, also was selected.

They are among 50 chosen from universities such as Harvard, Columbia, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. The University of Texas at Austin was one of 17 institutions with more than one scientist selected.

HHMI is a leading funder of U.S. biomedical research, granting about $700 million a year to more than 350 researchers.

The scientists receive a six-year appointment to the institute and, along with it, the freedom to explore their best ideas without worrying about where to find the money to fund those experiments.

HHMI said the scientists were chosen, in part, because of their willingness to try new things. It cited Bolnick’s stickleback research as an example.

The sticklebacks Bolnick studies live in lakes in western Canada. The fish’s ocean-going ancestors colonized the lakes created by retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. The sticklebacks have been remarkably successful in adapting to various niches in their new habitats in a relatively short time.

The environmental variations among the lakes make them the perfect setting for Bolnick to explore how the fish co-evolve with other organisms.

He wants to determine why each lake harbors a distinctive community of parasites. He will then measure how sticklebacks’ immune systems have evolved to fight off the parasites found in any given lake. Sorting out these responses may improve understanding of chronic parasite-borne diseases that affect humans.

Bolnick has studied sticklebacks since 2004. Before that he worked with plants and fruit flies (Drosophila). His first paper as lead author was on fruit flies. He also did some mathematical theory work.

“I started working with stickleback because of the incredible within-species diversity, replicated in thousands of independent natural evolutionary experiments,” he said.

Bolnick realized the stickleback and their lake habitats offer the opportunity to study a model organism where it really lives, outside the laboratory.

“It became clear that stickleback were developing into a next-generation model organism,” he said. “Unlike most model organisms that are kept in the lab, we know an incredible amount about the biology and ecology of natural populations of stickleback, allowing model-organism tools to be applied to natural-organism questions.”