#SciFund recovery

“Dream come true” sounds too hokey. “I love it when a plan comes together” sounds too smug.

It was a long week of hard work, much of it hard physical labour, with a lot of mistakes and frustrations. By the end of it, I felt like this:

Ready for it to be over.

But I achieved everything I set out to achieve... in miniature. This is in line with the spirit of #SciFund, since #SciFund was a miniature grant.

I set out for crayfish, and I got crayfish:

I got small animals, little tiny hatchlings. These are going to have to grow for a while before they’re any good to me.

I set out for sand crabs, and I got sand crabs:

I got a small number of animals, less than the number of my fingers. I have enough for to be useful for at least one project.

All the way through the trip I was very aware that this was possible because of the generosity of people who donated to #SciFund. I was frequently updating a blog I created for supporters, and journaling the expedition for an audience made the trip a little less isolating.

Would I have liked to have had a few more data points, the important thing was that I did not come away empty handed. It was wonderful to be out in the field, trying to tackle problems and do things that I had been thinking about for a couple of years. Now I will have to spend a few more months thinking and working before I know what to do next.

(Crossposted from NeuroDojo.)

#SciFund update

I swear to you, this is purely coincidence.

It is purely coincidence that today:

• I am getting on a plane to Florida on a crustacean collecting trip powered by #SciFund support, and...
• Round three of #SciFund launches!

It’s been a long time coming for my #SciFund expedition. Round 1 was about this time last year. Then, I was so focused on doing the project that I didn’t realize that the slough crayfish I wanted to collect were seasonal, and the best time to collect them was November.

I will be blogging about my #SciFund trip here, but only a little bit. My supporters from round 1 and 2 will be getting access to s special expedition blog, Amazons and Goliaths, where I will be blogging much more extensively and in a much different format than here.

I should also say that Kyle McLea, who had a Marmorkrebs project in Round 2 of #SciFund, recently got a whole lot of crayfish shipped to him. So his crowdfunded research is on a roll now, too.

As for round three of #SciFund, this is the first time I do not have a horse in this race, so to speak. But you should go to Rockethub and check out all the cool projects!

The $100,000 challenge

The current round of #SciFund ends today.

Kyle McLea’s Marmorkrebs project made it total long ago. Indeed, it’s been this round’s “break-out project” in terms of percent raised compared to target - more than 200%.

But I want to talk a bit about the overall amount we’ve raised at #SciFund. We cracked the $90,000 mark yesterday.

I cannot tell you how fantastic it would be to hit the $100,000 mark. So please, check out the projects to see if there are any that would like to support, even with a dollar or two. (Moral support matters a lot!)

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/scifund

There is nothing preventing you from giving a little extra to a project that has hit 100%. If you cannot donate, please spread the word that time is running out to be part of something great.

Never send a sibling to do a clone’s job: Part 2

More guest post goodness from Kyle McLea! Check Part 1 here.

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Crayfish are quite tractable for neuro experiments, including nervous system organization and function, and have been useful in many past experiments.

Importantly, as a crustacean biologist, I can also see how they’d be useful models for other, larger, more “economically important” decapod crustaceans like lobsters and crabs, for which rearing is very difficult or impossible with current techniques. Although Marmorkrebs have a fairly long generation time and only a “primitive” crustacean has had its genome sequenced, marbled crayfish are easily kept and reared and have a number of other reasons in their favor as a useful model organism.

Now, I don’t want to tread where others have already walked. Important in the “What can we use the Marmorkrebs to study?” literature is Günter Vogt’s 2008 article in the Journal of Zoology.

Vogt discusses many reasons why Marmorkrebs are of use to a scientist—they are easily grown and cared for, they “breed” all year round, all life stages are accessible for examination, and more. They have large eggs found outside the body that are excellent for those studying development from the embryonic stage to adulthood.

He goes on to make the case that marbled crayfish will be useful for developmental biology, stem cell research, and studies of regeneration. In addition, because the animals are genetically identical, epigenetics and epigenomics may be a powerful niche where these clone crayfish can prove their utility. Epigenetics is the study of variation that is not dependent on the DNA sequence of an organism—and in epigenetics we see marks of diet, aging, and other happenstances of life stamped “upon” the DNA but not actually changing its sequence. The definition of an epigenetic effect is seeing differences in some phenotype (outward appearance of a trait) in an organism among isogenic (genetically-identical) animals. For epigenetics, which will be enormous in 21^st century biology, a genetically identical crayfish may be just what we need.

Vogt also goes on to recommend marbled crayfish for studies of evolution and for toxicology studies. I’m going to talk about the latter before moving on to some other reasons to be excited about these incredible crayfish.

Crayfish have long been lauded as “sentinel species” for monitoring environmental quality. A number of parameters of crayfish physiology are helpful to scientists studying pollution, including how these animals survive, what metals or contaminants they accumulate in their tissues, and more. So, Marmorkrebs can certainly serve just as well as other crayfish. But in fact, their genetic identity is of further use in toxicology studies. Smaller numbers of animals in a given strain are needed for testing if they are all genetically identical and react similarly to a drug or toxin. And although it seems counter-intuitive, testing a few different strains or lines within a species may demonstrate greater total genetic variance than looking at a single outbred strain of animals in greater numbers. So in the end, we can maintain large numbers of the small marbled crayfish for toxicology studies, minutely manipulate their environment by introducing drugs or environmental chemicals, and perhaps get a better read out on toxicities and safety than we might even get from rodents. Now, I think a lot more studies are really needed before we could actually demonstrate that, but it is a potential use. And these animals would surely be better models for toxicology of invertebrates regardless.

Finally, I also think these clone crayfish will make a great model organism for genetic studies. We don’t have many macroscopic (visible without microscopy), multicellular organisms that are both isogenic and easily genetically manipulable. (That is, can we introduce new genes? Can we change the ones that are there?) Marmorkrebs could fill that need.

Now, we have a long way to go, since cell culture is currently problematic for crustaceans, we have had only limited success manipulating gene expression in crustaceans, and less success has been had in developing transgenic decapod crustaceans. But once some of these problems have been addressed, I think the scientific community may be more willing to accept Marmorkrebs as a useful genetic tool in the study of invertebrate genetics.

Which brings me to the ultimate point of this entire article, for those who are still reading. I have a project that is a small step in the study of marbled crayfish and their genetics.

In collaboration with Doctor Zen, I’m raising money (through the #SciFund Challenge) to study the genes of Marmorkrebs and get a lot more information about their organization and the similarity between lines descended from different crayfish mothers. How genetically identical are they? What differences do we see between lines? How about if we compare them with the sexual version of Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax? (Which I haven’t mentioned, but is another whole neat aspect of the Marmorkrebs story!) There is so much to learn.

See the video here. (It’s better than Cats. Okay, not really.)

But if you’ve read this far and are interested to help us learn more, consider funding this project with a $1 or $5 donation here. Or if you can’t donate, consider spreading the word to your friends and social networks.

Thanks, and remember: Never send a sibling (or some outbred critter) to do a clone’s job. That’s what we have Marmorkrebs for.

Kyle, scientist at Colorado State University and science blogger at By Way of Science.

Never send a sibling to do a clone’s job: Part 1

Today, a guest post from Kyle McLea, who has been carrying the Marmorkrebs banner for this round of #SciFund.

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As a crustacean biologist who has chiefly studied crabs and lobsters, I’ve been fascinated by the marbled crayfish (Marmorkrebs) for years and for a number of reasons that I’ll detail below. But the first thing that attracted me was simply this.

Really? A crayfish that clones itself?

When Doctor Zen asked me to guest blog on the Marmorkrebs blog I was sure I had a lot to say about my interest in these fascinating critters, but I also wanted to speak to the wider interest of the scientific community. In short: Why should scientists (and the public) care?

To which I say: Never send a (mere) sibling to do a clone’s job.

Let me explain.

Marmorkrebs are a parthenogenetic crayfish. All known examples are female and reproduce themselves entirely without sex. This makes it the first example of a decapod crustacean (and there ~15,000 known species of crabs, lobsters, shrimp, and crayfish!) that only reproduces asexually. There have been a couple of other examples of crayfish that have been found to be genetically identical or to sometimes reproduce asexually, but marbled crayfish were the first found to procreate this way exclusively.

So, in a word, we’re dealing with clone crayfish.

To anyone who’s been following the molecular biology revolution over the past 30ish years, the word clone has both amazing power and amazing misuse and confusion. Clone can mean a lot of things. In this case, I’m not talking about cloning genes (experimentally extracting pieces of nucleic acid, sequencing them, and using them to assemble recombinant—new—combinations of DNA sequence for introduction to a different organism) or about using somatic-cell nuclear transfer to clone embryos (like Dolly the sheep). What I’m saying is that mother and daughter marbled crayfish should be genetically identical, or nearly so, much like identical twins in humans.

It turns out that scientists have thought a lot about the benefits of studying genetically identical individuals in a population, pretty much for as long as there has been a science of genetics. Case in point for inbred (nearly genetically identical) organisms:

“Just as the purity of the chemical assures the pharmacist of the proper filling of the doctor’s prescription, so the purity of the mouse stock can assure a research scientist of a true and sure experiment...In experimental medicine today... the use of in-bred genetic material... is just as necessary as the use of aseptic and anti-septic precautions in surgery.” —C.C. Little, 1936

Now Little may have held some ill-conceived notions about eugenics and the role of tobacco in causing cancer, but on the importance of genetically-identical (isogenic) and inbred laboratory strains he was a pioneer. His work to build up the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine (the mecca of 5000 unique strains of mice), was a key part of the rise of defined strains and breeds of laboratory animals that continues today.

Those laboratory strains serve as “models” for various human diseases and for particular functions of human physiology, such as immunity or heart function. Among the model organisms listed at NIH, for instance, everything from yeast to mouse and Daphnia to zebrafish can help us to learn about different aspects of human biology and beyond.

But in each case the normal biological variation within an organism confounds us and complicates our study. Unless we want to see the full extent of biological variance (and sometimes we do—safety and efficacy testing of drugs on different populations, anyone?), having organisms that are as close to identical as possible is (often) the goal.

For mice and rats, you might have to backcross (do parent/offspring matings) for more than 20 generations to have a sufficiently inbred line to call it “genetically identical” (and I suspect some gene variation may still exist). Now, mice breed fast, but 20 generations is still real time (years) in the life of a scientist. In the mean time, scientists resort to use of siblings, littermates, or much less inbred animals. These animals have many more differences at the genetic level.

I know you’re seeing where I’m going with this… if an organism started out genetically identical, you’d have a great edge in using this organism to study any number of interesting things. Bringing us back to Marmorkrebs.

Lines of the marbled crayfish are believed to be genetically identical because they do not participate in the normal exchange and shuffling process that accompanies sexual reproduction. But of course, mutations happen to us all. So they’re not likely to be absolutely 100% identical between individuals, but much closer than anything else in the world except for natural identical twins/triplets/etc.

So, I say, send in the clone crayfish. With these animals, we don’t need to compare results with a genetically-different sibling or with an unrelated animal. This unique animal can not only be a useful biological model, but we also don’t have any easily-reared decapod crustacean that can really compete with marbled crayfish, if you take into account their genetic identity.

While they might not be a great model organism for general human physiology (they are crustaceans, after all), there are some specific ways they can help us understand human physiology (e.g., nerves) and they have a lot of other potential uses as a model organism.


Kyle, scientist at Colorado State University and science blogger at By Way of Science. Come back next week for Part 2!

SciFunded... again!

A big congratulations to Kyle McLea, whose #SciFund Marmorkrebs research project, Crayfish Clone Wars, is now funded.

More impressive, Kyle not only hit his target early, he kicked it a few times and knocked it over for good measure.

Just because a project has met its target, however, does not mean that you can’t still give a donation. You can continue to fuel #SciFund projects until the end of May!

For more crustacean goodness you can support on #SciFund, consider:

A Climate for Castrators? by Alyssa Gehman, which is about the mud crab, Eurypanopeus depressus, and its parasite, Loxothylacus panopeus.

Beach of the Goliath Crabs by Zen Faulkes (me!), which is about the sand crab, Lepidopa benedicti.

SciFund 2 begins!

SciFund is back! Hosted once again by the fine folks at RocketHub, there are a whole mess of scientific research projects for you to support!

Look for Kyle McLea’s Marmorkrebs project, Crayfish Clone Wars!

You should go to RocketHub now and support scientific research!

Crawling out of the swamp May 1st!

Get your donations ready!

SciFund 2: Return of the Marmorkrebs!

You may recall that last year, I had a Marmorkrebs project in the inaugural SciFund Challenge.

I’m pleased to report that Marmorkrebs and I will both be back in the next SciFund challenge, starting in May.

But not together.

Kyle MacLea will be carrying the banner for Marmorkrebs in Round 2. To learn more, you should follow Kyle’s blog, By Way of Science. He’s also on Twitter and Google Plus.

This is an opportune time to update people on the status of the project I successfully launched in round 1. I contacted some experts on Procambarus fallax in Florida, and the answer I got was consistent. The best time to collect for that species was... November. News will be slow on the first #SciFund project, then.

As for my own project in SciFund 2, you can read about it over at my other blog, NeuroDojo.

#SciDone!

And there’s the siren! The #SciFund challenge has came to an end! Here are some of my initial reactions to the experience.

Things that I didn’t expect:

Fewer people, bigger donations. I thought most donations would be small – a dollar or two – and projects would have hundreds of supporters. Instead, projects had tens of supporters contributing $10-20, and more, often much more. Consequently,  my “I make my target if everyone chips in 50 cents” pitch to my several thousand followers on Twitter and Google Plus wasn’t effective.

Traditional media still rules. The break out success story was, without a doubt, Kristina Kilgrove’s Roman DNA project. There’s no doubt that it made it because it was on the CNN website.

Cool beats practical: Given how much talk there is on how people want to see “results” and “return on investment” in traditional funding, my one post where I described how my research might have a practical pay-off to aquaculture got the least hits of anything I did to promote my project over six weeks.

Weak relationship between video views and dollars. “Duck force” got more than ten times the views of my video, but it didn’t get ten times the donations.

Front end loaded: I expected most funds to come in at the very beginning and the very end. RocketHub confirmed that this is the normal pattern. But the “bump” in the last few days was much smaller than I expected. On my project, the amount of dollars raised and time elapsed were pretty tightly correlated.

So emotional: I touched on this before here. I got way more wrapped up in this tiny little fundraising effort than most other projects.

Not much variation. Most projects raised about the same amount, regardless of their targets. $1,000 or so seems to be the sweet spot for now.

I made the right call to keep my project target small. At one point, I almost raised it, and if I had, I don’t think I would have made it. Projects that want to raise ten grand are either going to have to be brilliant or wait for the crowdfunding of science to mature.

Things that disappointed me:

Notice us! We didn’t get as much attention from science media as I expected. No coverage in the Science, Nature, The Guardian, The New York Times, Quirks and Quarks, and so on.

Whiff: Thirty-nine projects didn’t meet their targets.

Low gear: I was hoping to be one of the first projects to get past the post. I though that I would have a good shot at it, based on responses of people to whom I showed my video, and that I had one of the lowest targets.

Left undone: I had ideas for three more videos that I didn’t get to make.

Things that made me happy:

Mad skills: I learned a lot about how to make short videos. I may be doing more.

Total: Over $75,000 for science!

Hits! Ten projects met their targets.

This time, it’s personal: And one of them was mine.

If #SciFund were to go again:

I would say: Yes. Even though it’s inefficient, it’s fun. And as I noted, I’m unlikely to walk away completely empty-handed, which is usually what I get for writing big grant applications.

Stay home: I would try not to go to the biggest scientific meeting in the world for a week. I felt I lost quite a bit of momentum because of that.

More focus: Not my call, but at first we had over 200 people express interest in doing this. We ended up with 49 live projects. I wonder if even that was spreading attention too thin.

There will be much more analysis of the #SciFund challenge in the days and months to come. It was a social experiment, and we are all scientists, after all. But for now, this is...

Photo by viking_79 on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

A #SciFund success story!

We. have. MADE IT!

I was sitting at home, working on just one last video to try to convince people to support my #SciFund project, when I heard the sound of an email alert. When I saw it was from RocketHub, I was excited, because I had been getting close to my target. How much closer might I get?

When I read the email, I almost had a heart attack. It was enough to push me past the finish line!

My day went from this:

To this:

(Since I was sitting at a computer, of course my first move was to tweet about it.)

The #SciFund challenge isn’t over! I still want to see if I can squeeze out one more video promoting my project. We are allowed to have donations exceed the target. If there is enough money, I will take a student with me on the expedition! And RocketHub even rewards people who fuel a project after it hits its target with the Supernova badge!

And for those who watched my promo video all the way to the end, you’ll know I have another project  I promised to reveal if I met my target:

The Beach of the Goliath Crabs!

I will be revealing the secret of this project soon!

Thank you to those who have supported this project, either financially or morally!

(Crossposted from NeuroDojo.)

Kitten or crayfish?

We’re into the last two weeks of the #SciFund challenge! And I’m getting just a little punch drunk out here...

And so, I prove yet again that everything on the Internet eventually turns to pictures of cats.



For those who have supported me already: Thank you once again!

For everyone else: Hey, isn’t it payday today? Would you miss a couple of bucks? Even a few bucks will help me meet my target!

You should visit RocketHub and support crayfish research!

The #SciFund team-up!

One of the things I love about being in the #SciFund challenge?

Teamwork.

The advantage of #SciFund is that nobody is going it alone. We have been able to share ideas and bounce ideas around between each other, and have stronger projects and more visibility than if any one of us was trying this on our own.

In that spirit, let me introduce fellow #SciFund challenger, Marisa Tellez!



P.S.—I’m stupidly happy with how this came out.

The #SciFund Challenge launches!

The wait is over.

The final version of Doctor Zen and the Amazon Crayfish Civilization is now ready for viewing at RocketHub! If you have three minutes, you have more than enough time to learn about my project in the #SciFund Challenge!

Why can’t you watch the video here? Because I want you to go to RocketHub, and not only watch mine, but look at the other insanely cool projects that have come in from around the world. If you don’t want to support me, please consider supporting someone else.

The #SciFund Challenge is an experiment in funding science. Over the next six weeks, I will be asking for your help in raising money for a research project. I’ll be talking more about the whys and wherefores in the next few days.

Want to learn more? Or perhaps even... donate?

You should go to RocketHub right now!

Coming soon...