811: Investigating Clams with Photosynthetic Algae, Parasites in Mud Shrimp, and Other Species Interactions that Shape Evolution - Dr. Jingchun Li
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Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Marie McNeely, your People Behind the Science podcast host, and I'm excited to have you here with me for Episode 811 with our guest, Dr. Jin Chun Lee. And if you want to get connected with us to hear about even more amazing people doing great science, follow us on Blue Sky at PBTScience, and I'm at PhDMarie.

And listeners, we have another great conversation on the way from today's guest. So get ready to meet another one of our remarkable people behind the science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science. Music

Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am excited to be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Jing-Tun Lee. So, Jing-Tun, welcome to the show today. How are you? Good. Thank you for inviting me. Very excited to be here, talk about my science journey. Well, we are excited to have you here, and thank you again so much for joining us. And before we get into the details of your work, I'd like to start by telling our listeners a little bit more about your current position and your work.

and the steps you took to get to where you are today. So listeners, Jingchun is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, and she is the curator of invertebrates at CU Boulder's Museum of Natural History. She is also a Packard Foundation fellow and a National Geographic Explorer. Jingchun completed her bachelor's degree in biological sciences at Capital Normal University in China,

And she was awarded her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan. Next, Jing-Chuan conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University with support from an NSF Ocean Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. And afterwards, she joined the faculty there at the University of Colorado Boulder. And Jing-Chuan, we're excited to hear more about your science today, of course, but we also want to learn more about you. So can you start by telling us what do you like to do when you're not doing science?

Always busy doing stuff. Just kidding. I enjoy rock climbing, mostly indoors in the gym because I live in Boulder and it's hard to avoid rock climbing when you live in Boulder. So me and my lab members usually go climbing once or twice a week after work. I also love musicals a lot, especially in the movie Wicked just came out and we enjoyed watching it together. I like reading.

And most of the days I just love spending time with my kids after work, playing board games, reading, watching things. It's fun. I love that. Do you have a favorite board game at the moment? Oh, we always like Settlers. Settlers of Content. That's always fun. Takes a long time to finish. A solid choice though. Now you mentioned you love reading. Reading is something that I love as well. It's something we encourage our listeners to do more of. So

So do you have a favorite book that you'd like to recommend for our listeners, whether it's related to science or something outside of science? It changes from time to time. When I was little, it could be Harry Potter and other things. But now recently, I think one of my favorite is called Exhalation from Ted Chiang. You might know him from his other books in the story of your life, the famous ones. But he's more recent one, 2019 Exhalation. It's a collection of short sci-fi stories. I really love his stories.

Very cool. Well, listeners, we will add these to our website for you all to find to add to your own reading lists. And we've heard a little bit about life outside of science. I think rock climbing, spending time with the family, having fun with board games and definitely reading are wonderful ways to refresh yourself before going back in the lab. But you are doing some really cool science. So how do you describe your work to someone who's not in your field or perhaps outside of science altogether?

I would say I study how different species interact with each other and how that impact their evolutionary trajectory and past and history.

Very cool. And if someone wants to know more about these species that you study, what do you tell them? A lot of the species I study fall in the category called mollusks. So these are your clams and snails, octopus, squids, and etc. I think recently a lab has been focused on bivalves. So those are your scallops and clams and cockles and etc.,

And particularly, we work on a few species. One of the most famous ones you probably have heard are giant clams. We also work on hard cockles. We work on file clams and a few others. Very interesting looking clams. I think that's so cool. And we also mentioned in your introduction that you are curator of invertebrates at the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History. Can you talk a little bit more about what you do in this role?

So I always like to remind people that if you think about animal diversity, you think about vertebrates, the animals with backbones, and invertebrates, animals without backbones. And actually more than 97% of animals are invertebrates. So they encompass a lot of diversity in the animal world.

And in our museum, we have lots of cool collections about different organisms. And my specialty is invertebrates. So I'm in charge of thinking about the vision and development of this collection of

almost a million invertebrate specimens. So we provide good stewardship to them. And we also try to document the information, how they're collected, where they're collected, when they're collected, where those species are. And we try to make them publicly available. So scientists and the public anywhere in the world theoretically should be able to go on our website and try to look at what kind of collections we have.

They can try to contact us for visits. Scientists can contact us for looking at the specimens and maybe incorporate them as part of their research project. So that's kind of my day-to-day role as a curator in the collection.

Oh, that's so cool, Ting Chun. And I'm excited to hear more about your work as we progress through our interview. But let's maybe pause here just to talk about motivation. I think there are dark days in science, difficult times and struggles you have to work through. So it can be helpful to have a quote or a saying or a mantra or just something to keep you motivated and inspired and going in every day. So do you have a favorite that really keeps you motivated? I don't think I have a motivational quote. I'm just motivated to figure out weird things in nature. Yeah.

So is there a particular weird creature you're fascinated by or sort of a particular element of your curiosity that drives you to go in on those days where you really just want to stay in bed? A lot of the creatures I study are marine organisms. And I think just the curiosity associated with how mysterious the marine ecosystem is and how much we don't know about it is always motivating for me to get up to figure out and understand how things work.

I love that. And I think that motivation, that curiosity can be a driving force for a lot of scientists. But I think you also meet a lot of people who maybe push you along in your career and inspire you and motivate you as you go through your career path. So can you share with us, do you have particular role models or mentors or even these inspirational figures that you looked up to who helped you get to where you are today?

Yeah, definitely. Throughout my career, I had a lot of great mentors. My PhD advisor, Dr. Jim Rolfoio from University of Michigan. My postdoc advisor, especially Dr. Colleen Kavanaugh from Harvard. I can talk more about how her lab, I think she gave me a lot of good career advices and inspired me to carry on as more of an independent scientist and run a lab. Fantastic. So can you share what were some of these lessons learned from that postdoc advisor? Yeah.

She always says, if you don't try, you'll never get it. Because sometimes as an early career scientist, you're busy applying jobs, applying for grants, writing papers. And then sometimes I will see a job ad and I will say, well, I don't think I'm ready for it. I don't think I'm good enough for it. And then she will always say, if you don't try, you'll never get it. So it's very good to keep that in mind. I do the same with my students now. Like, no, be confident. Even if you're not confident, try. Give it a try. Otherwise, you'll never get it. So that's very good for me to learn.

I love that. So can you maybe talk about this role of being a mentor in your career, in your position today? I do enjoy, I really enjoy being a mentor. And it comes with a lot of challenges, of course, but I think the biggest motivation for me to be a good mentor is to try to help my mentees, my students to reach whatever career goal they want to reach.

And we have to realize that not everybody is exactly the same as you, right? They have different interests, different motivations and different long-term career goals. And I think as a mentor, our job is to assist them to help them maximize their potential to reach what they want to reach and not just what we want them to do.

I love that. I think individualizing the mentorship and sort of the support you provide for each trainee is a tremendous approach and can really help people realize their potential and help them realize what they want to actually do instead of being pigeonholed into a particular path. Yeah, exactly. My students sometimes will ask, what is your mentoring style? And I would just say, my style is I have no styles. Let's talk about what you need and maybe let's personalize the next few years and see what approach fit you the best.

I think that's a great way to help people chart their own career paths. But perhaps we can talk more about your career path. Jingchuan, can you walk us back to the very beginning and tell us how did you first get interested in science in the very beginning there? So I was born and raised in China, the capital city in Beijing. And it's a big city where I didn't have a lot of opportunities, I guess, to go

in nature, like in Boulder here, you can go in mountains. 10 minutes, right? I didn't have that. But I think when I was in maybe elementary school, I was introduced to this set of books by Willard Price. It's called the Adventure Series or something like that. It's about this brother, Hall and Roger, I think. These two brothers...

who lived in the United States and their father ran a zoo. So these two brothers would just go all around the world collecting animals, helping animal conservation, or going to weird places.

expeditions, deep sea to collect animals. So I was reading all of these books in, I don't know, third grade or something. And I just planted this impression in my head, I guess this is the best career you can ever have. I want to go explore and take care of animals and look at different animals. So I think that just set up the idea for me very early. So when I was in middle school or high school, people were like, what do you want to study? In college, I always said biology. I want to do biology. There's no other

So that's how I get majored in biology in my undergrad. And then after that, I was doing some internship in the Chinese Academy of Sciences in a very cool lab that studies spiders and cave spiders in southern China and other cave creatures. So I was initially just doing little work here and there, helping out with the lab. And then one day my PI at that time showed me this jar of

of a cave shrimp that completely lack eyes. I think because they've lived in the cave environment for a long time and they evolved to lose their vision because it's not advantageous there. It's too dark.

So I was just blown away. Like, wow, you have this shrimp that have no eyes. And he said, there's a new species. You could describe it because we know this is a new species. And I was just super excited and read a lot of literature and eventually described it as a new species. And that kind of set me off to wanting a career in evolutionary biology. So I applied for grad school in the US and then got accepted. And there I earned my PhD at the University of Michigan and then move on to a postdoc at Harvard and then landed on my

current position.

I think the way you describe your pathway, it sounds so easy. Then I went to grad school and then I got a postdoc and then I got a faculty position. It was beautiful. There were a lot of challenges and setbacks, but it all worked out. Of course. So what were some of these maybe key moments throughout the rest of your training? You mentioned this pivotal moment of being able to describe this new species of eyeless cave shrimp, which I think is so cool. What were some of these moments afterwards that maybe helped shape the path that you took from your PhD forward?

I think a lot of them are related to field work because I was super excited to learn the theoretical background aspects of evolution and then of all the other projects I was doing. But it's always the field work that kind of brings you back to nature while you're there, maybe snorkeling, looking for the organisms you're searching for, actually.

after five days, you finally find it. And that's the moment where you just suddenly realize, okay, this is why I'm here. There's great biodiversity out there. And human is one species among this great diversity. I'm so little here in this vast ocean snorkeling trying to find this one thing. And now we're here, we're connected. And this is why I want to figure out their life history, their ecology, and how that impact us.

it's always that inspiring moments when you're in the field. Definitely. I think that field research can be a tremendously valuable experience for early career scientists. And like you said, very inspiring and motivating, just that feeling of awe being out in nature doing your research. So can you share with us, as you were completing your PhD at the University of Michigan, how were you deciding where you wanted to go next and what brought you specifically to Harvard?

So when I was doing my PhD, my project is focused on understanding, like I said before, how biological interactions impact organismal evolution. And the group I work on is this tiny clam, a

A very diverse group of tiny clams that like to live in or on other invertebrates. So if you go somewhere to collect, for example, a crab or shrimp and you crack them open, you'll see these little tiny clams clamping on their gills or living inside their guts and things like that.

So it's very exciting for me to see these bizarre creatures, understand their evolution. And after that, I thought maybe I need to not only focus on one partner of this relationship, right? Because I was really focusing on the clams and I didn't spend a lot of time looking at the organism that they live in or they live on. So I thought maybe I should gain more knowledge to understand both partners or even more partners in this relationship.

And that's why I looked up for people who really have expertise in these kind of associations called symbiosis. And then I find out Dr. Colleen Kavanaugh's research profile, and she works on bacteria and other type of symbiosis, and she's an expert in this field. So that inspired me to go apply to work in her lab. And I was fortunate enough to get an SF fellowship to support my work. And that's how I moved to Harvard and started to work with her.

Wonderful. And then I think that transition from a postdoctoral fellow to a faculty position is often a challenging one. So can you talk us through how you navigated that? Yeah, like I said, I wasn't ready when I was applying for a job. I said, okay, maybe I'll do a couple more years. And then she says, no, you start applying right now. And I said,

And then I think I was just very lucky that the timing worked out that this position at CU Boulder opened up. It is a joint position between the Department of Ecology and Ocean Biology and the Museum of Natural History. And these kind of positions are rare. There are not that many of them in the U.S. So the timing works out really well. And because I had

a pretty extensive work in history museums, I guess, because back in China, when I was doing my internship, that was a museum. And then Michigan has a great museum of natural history. I was working in their associate with the museum. Harvard has a great museum, natural history museum as well. So I had a lot of experience with that. And also this position is looking for someone who might have specializations in mollusks because I studied mollusks in our collection. Red SEO Boulder has a lot of great collections with mollusks.

So all of that together make me a competitive candidate for this position. So I applied and then went through the interview and very lucky to get the job early stages of my postdoc. Well, it sounds like that position was just made for you, Jing Chun. I still can't believe it sometimes. I'm like, wow, it's actually just evidence.

Dream job. Well, can you tell us a little bit more about what you are doing in this dream job of yours? And perhaps if there's a particular project you're working on right now or have recently completed that was just the most exciting. Yeah, we were talking about the project on giant clam genomes before, right? So that's one of the projects we recently completed. That's, what, three, four years of work putting in there. And the paper is fabulous. That's very exciting. So in this project, we're looking at how giant clams...

interact with their symbiotic algae. I guess let's track back if you are not familiar with the system. Giant clams are not only living by themselves. They actually have symbiotic single-cellular algae living inside their tissue most of their lives. And they rely on these symbiotic algae to perform photosynthesis, colonization,

convert inorganic carbon to organic carbon, sugar basically, right? And then the clams are getting sugar out of their algae as their food and resources. And then they provide some inorganic nutrients and protection for the algae. So this is a very interesting mutualistic interaction there. So then the giant clams can live in very nutrient-poor environments. They don't need to have a lot of nutrients around. They can just rely on sunlight.

And that might be part of the reason why they can grow so big, because they have this solar powered energy from their algae partner. So we're really interested in understanding what are some of the molecular mechanisms and some of the, I guess, genomic consequences of

of having this long-term association with algae. So our lab PhD student, Dr. Ritchie Lee, he graduated now, was able to sequence the whole genome of one particular species of giant clam and analyze it, compare it with the other non-symbiotic relatives in this group and see what's so unique and different about their genome. So that's a very exciting project we recently finished.

I think that is so cool. Can you give us some insights into what were a few of the findings of what was so unique and different with these particular giant clam genomes? You mentioned they're unique, right? Not all clams have this symbiotic relationship. Yeah. And not all of them have that. Yeah. A few lineages, a way of feeling you just have them. I guess one of the interesting we found is about the immune system in giant clams. So through molecular work, we see that symbiotic

some of the common immune mechanisms for organisms to recognize pathogens around their environment. So these genes in giant cones have been lost. So they've lost some of the mechanisms to recognize pathogens or other microbes in their environment. However, their genome have a few unique molecular mechanisms to

to recognize novel microbes who are guessing that this is what they use to recognize their somatic algae when they're larvae. And then so they can incorporate the algae into their tissue and let them grow. And I think the reason that they have a bit of a suppressed immune system compared to their relatives

It's because they need to maintain hundreds of thousands of cells of algae inside their tissues so they can have a really hyper reactive immune system. Otherwise, they will start to attack the algae, right? We think there is a sort of a trade-off where you have a novel mechanism to recognize your partner algae and then you damp down some of your immune reactions so you can keep them in your tissue for long term.

That is fascinating. And taking a step back and thinking about the bigger picture, understanding these giant clam species better is critically important. Can you share why? So this interaction I was talking about is unique. It's only found in a few clams. It's actually kind of prevalent if you think about the entire tree of life.

This kind of relationship, right, a host and a symbiotic algae or bacteria living together have evolved multiple times in our tree of life. And one of the most famous example you perhaps know are corals. So coral animals are doing similar things. They grow or associate algae. They put them in their cells, right? The algae are living inside the coral cells.

giving them organic sugar, giving them power, and then the coral is protecting the algae. So this relationship is very crucial for our marine ecosystem. So the reef building corals have this relationship and that is why they can also live in very nutrient poor environment. And then they build this massive reef structure.

And then they support huge marine biodiversity. And most of the biodiversity we found are in these reef environments. And of course, we all hear that they are facing a lot of crisis. They're starting to disassociate with their algae, maybe because of rising temperature or changing of environmental conditions. They start to bleach. And that is detrimental to the whole reef environment.

So understanding the evolution and ecology of these relationships, not just in corals, but also in other groups of animals, will help us understand maybe what is the foreseeable future of this association of the reef ecosystem and of the marine biodiversity and how we can potentially develop methods or mechanisms to prevent them from disassociating with algae, preventing them from bleaching and maybe recover some of the lost reef system.

Well, Jin Chuen, this is a fascinating project. I appreciate you sharing more about it. And I think such an important research topic to be investigating, particularly right now. But I know there are a lot of challenges. We hinted at this earlier. And I think particularly doing some of this fieldwork related to conservation has its own unique challenges. So can you talk a little bit more about some of the struggles that you've had or maybe a particular event, a failure, a challenge that you had to face and how you got through that tough time?

I think a lot of the challenges coming from our lab is related to us not understanding our system really well and not understanding where we're going to collect certain organisms and how to find them. Because a lot of the vertebrate systems are understudied and we have to rely on past literature, museum collections to figure out where we can go, how things are distributed, what are the habitats they live in.

and then try to plan for this fieldwork to go find them. But that's a lot of uncertainty lies within it, right? If you have a literature from 1970s.

They said, we found this organism in this particular habitat. We don't know if they're still there anymore, but we're still going to try. And that takes a long-term planning, right? For as scientists, if we want to go anywhere to collect specimens, usually we are required to apply for permits, for scientific permits from different organizations at different levels, depending on if you're going to marine protected areas, state park, et cetera. So

So we have to do all of that, which means we have to be fairly certain what we're going to do. And that's the big challenge in our work because we're just not certain. So we have to try a lot of different things. OK, let's try this. Let's go through the entire process, fly to Australia, to this hepatitis, maybe spend three weeks there and now finding things. And that's just normal. We have to accept that. And we have to come back. Perfect.

plan for the next trip. So a lot of that logistics and lacking knowledge is, I think, one of our biggest challenges in this work.

Oh, wow. So have you ever had a field season or a trip where you went out and you weren't able to find any examples of the species you were looking for? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So what do you do? How do you know when to stop, I suppose? You have a set period of time. You say, OK, this time I'm going to schedule three weeks for this work and I'm going to hit this five different localities and each locality I'm going to spend two days or three days there. And then if you can't, then you have to carry out, go to the next locality.

It sounds like that would be disheartening. How do you sort of get yourself motivated to get back into it after a failed field trip?

Even if you don't find the target species you're looking for, you're still exposed to this vast diversity and incredible creatures around you. So even if I didn't find something, I still sometimes tell myself and my students, like, we still learn something about this ecosystem, this habitat. We take lots of notes, lots of photos, right? So we still come back with a lot of other interesting creatures and we will learn about the environment.

And that will inform us too about the targeted species. Like if it's not there, that is a piece of information as well. I think you can't lose in a well-planned field trip. If it's safe and it's well-planned, you always learn something. Maybe it's not the intended things you're learning, but you're always increasing your knowledge on

on the ecosystem. I love that message. And I love kind of not thinking about it as a failure, just thinking about it as we learned something different than we expected we would. Yeah, that's part of science, right? Even if I plan my experiment really well in the lab and thinking that's going to answer the question I'm asking, it doesn't always happen. A lot of the times you get unexpected results. It doesn't fit your prediction. That's just part of science. Failure is

is not really a failure. It's more just you learn a different piece of information. I think any of that is helpful in pushing research forward. Absolutely. I think these surprises, these challenges are definitely common in science, but we don't want to dwell on the hard times. I'd love to talk about your successes as well. I think, Jinchuan, you've had so many wonderful successes to celebrate. Do you have a favorite story related to a success, whether it was a big win or even just a small but particularly meaningful one that you'd like to tell us more about?

So I have another project that are related to how parasitism impacts ecology and evolution of native species.

So this is a system where we go to the West Coast of the U.S. looking for a particular group of invertebrates called the mud shrimp. So these are little shrimp-like creatures that burrow deep in the sediment and you can find them from Mexico all the way to Alaska. And they have been recently heavily impacted by an invasive parasite. It's a little creature called isopod.

So these parasites will go live in the gills of these shrimps and suck their blood out and grow really big. So the female shrimps who gets parasites cannot reproduce anymore. So as you can imagine, if you are being infested by the parasites, the whole population will collapse. So

One of our projects is to assess the population status of this poor native shrimp and see the infestation rate of these populations and see if they are completely declining or there any hope for them. So that field trip was successful. My collaborators and I have been surveying California, Oregon, and recently Alaska, and

Although in some of the populations, we find very little evidence of this shrimp being thriving, we did find a lot of them in Alaska heavily infested. And we sort of find the northern boundary of the invasion where the isopod, the little parasite, is associated with the northernmost boundary of some of the shrimp populations. So that was very informative. That made me feel really good that we're learning a lot about this system of

about this invasive parasite, about its impact on the shrimp population. We were able to find a lot of informative populations, collect important infestation data all throughout the West Coast. And that will help us really get a deeper understanding of the system and maybe potentially develop monitoring or conservation strategies for these species.

Well, that makes sense. And you mentioned that these isopods, the parasites and the shrimp themselves, the mud shrimp live deep in the sediment. What is it like going out there and finding them or collecting these samples? It's very interesting. You have to step in the mud and risking sinking in the mud deep and coming out. So my collaborators, Dr. John Chapman from Oregon State had

lot of little quirks that he used to help us not sink in the mud. Sometimes we drag a skateboard with no wheels. You just take the wheels off and you drag the skateboard with you and walk miles into the sand and then you step on the mud and

and the board so you don't actually sink and then we dig a big hole and get the shrimps out. Or sometimes we use this little thing called the yuppie pump. You can imagine, like I think of it as a giant syringe or something. It just suck animals out of their burrow so we don't have to dig too deep. We just aim it at the hole and then suck the shrimp or the isoprop out.

So it's very fun. It's very muddy every time, every night we have to try to clean up all our gears and wash up. And otherwise you're just full of mud all the time. Oh, this sounds like a lot of fun. It's kind of fun. Yeah. Well, this sounds like an amazing success. And

Though it sounds like it's sort of a bit sad, though, to be finding that this invasive parasite is infesting. It sounds like a lot of the shrimp that you're studying. Yes, it's definitely sad. In some populations, we'll find infestation rate at 90% or more. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's very sad.

But on the other hand, I'm happy that we're working on the system because if we're not, the shrimp could be gone without we realize it. So this is something at least we're in the middle of it and then we're revealing some of the mechanisms and see what we can learn from it. Absolutely. Well, it sounds like this work has been successful in terms of getting out there in the field, battling the mud, getting the data that you need to potentially save this mud shrimp species. And we appreciate

We appreciate the work that you're doing in this area. And it sounds like you've been able to do a fair bit of travel throughout your career, whether it was for training to go do field work around the world and to work with collaborators. So I'd love to talk about some of these travel opportunities, Jingcheng. So can you share with us, have you had a trip that you've been on that was just your most favorite or most memorable that you can tell us about?

Oh, yeah, for sure. I was on sabbatical last year, actually. So I spent six months in Western Australia doing a lot of fieldwork. And that's probably so far my favorite memory of fieldwork. So I was collaborating with the Western Australia Museum with their curator, Dr. Lisa Kirkendale.

trying to understand evolution again of the symbiotic relationship between clams and their algae. So this time it's not just giant clam, but a different group called the hard cockle. And Dr. Kirtenthal also worked on them before during her PhD. So I decided to visit their collections, look at their specimens. And then we also planned this 10 days field trip to different sites in Western Australia to this very unadulterated,

underexplored marine habitats to collect the photosymbiotic bivalves and their algae from these habitats. And that's just an amazing experience because living in North America and back in China, the Australia fauna is very different from the rest of the world. The marine biodiversity there is amazing. My students, I were there, they were diving, I was snorkeling. We see so much amazing diversity there and different species than we usually will see or pay attention to.

And then we also had a lot of success collecting our targeted organism. And like other field trips I've had, this time we've had a lot of success collaborating with local scientists and indigenous groups in their local habitats. So it's really, really fun and it's very successful.

That's so cool. And I definitely agree that Australia has this unique flora and fauna, like you described, particularly in terms of marine life around the Great Barrier Reef and just the ocean surrounding Australia. So has there been a species that you were just the most excited to actually be able to see in the wild?

Oh, yeah, for sure. So in Western Australia, there's this place called Shark Bay. I don't know if you've heard of it. In that region, there is a very particular habitat that we call a hypersaline pool. So it's a marine habitat, but it's very salty. So the salinity of the water there is very, very high compared to the rest of the marine habitats there.

And there is one particular species of clam that I studied that lived there and they're photosymbiotic and the entire beach is made of their shells. So they're so abandoned back then. I don't know for how many years, how many hundreds of years they were so abandoned there. So that's a species I always wanted to see living.

So we were able to see some of the populations that are living. We were able to collect them. Now we're bringing them back to Boulder and we're trying to figure out their population genetic structures. And there's a mystery about whether some of the populations are the same species or not, because some are living in this very salty habitat, some are not. So I have a student right now who is trying to figure out whether they're the same species or not.

Wow, that is so cool. And it sounds like these sabbaticals, these prolonged periods away from the lab and from your own institution to do research or to learn new skills are really good opportunities. How did you decide specifically to take your sabbatical there in Western Australia? I just know that's a great habitat for the systems that we're working on. I've always wanted to spend time there. So...

My collaborator, Dr. Kirkendall, and I have been talking about this for years. So we planned this maybe two years ahead. Like, I think I'm going to have a sabbatical in 2024. Can we try to plan this? So yeah, we started very early and just try to get us started and make sure it was successful. I think that's awesome. And you were able to spend quite a bit of time. You mentioned six months there in Western Australia. Were there specific maybe sightseeing things that you saw or did that we should definitely add to our travel itineraries if we're able to go?

Oh, yeah. I think Shark Bay is an amazing place. It's a bit remote. We have to drive nine hours from Perth, the big city, to Shark Bay, but it's definitely a great place to go. And Perth as a city is very fun too. I brought my kids with me as well. So the two kids were there and they went to school there and they're super happy in school there. Well, it sounds like an amazing experience. And I think...

And science, not only do you get to go to really cool places to do your research and to work with colleagues, I think the people that you get to meet are also phenomenal. These people who you mentor in your lab, who are your own mentors and also your peers and folks that you work with over the years. But oftentimes scientists don't get the best reputation in the media and in other portrayals. So we try to break the stereotypes that people may have by talking about some of these fun, funny and very human moments in science. So...

Yeah. Jingchen, do you have a story or maybe a quirky tradition that you've experienced or just something from your own career that really showcases this human side of science?

Oh, yeah, I have so many weird and funny moments in the lab. I can think of two that's more related to the things we talk about. One is when I was a postdoc in Dr. Kana's lab, she had this whole wall called the wall of rejection. Like she'd hang up all the rejection letters from herself and the students on the wall. Like usually you go to a scientist's office, they hang up the honors they receive, their degrees and their awards, right? But her office has all the rejection letters for jobs, for papers, for grants.

on the wall. I think that's pretty funny. And that's when she said, you know, that's just part of science. Get used to it. When you get a rejection letter, give it to me. I can hang it up on the wall. Yeah. Another thing I can think of is from this recent trip. Like I mentioned, we had to drive nine hours to Shark Bay, right? For our field trip. And then it just happened. There are four of us. One is our local collaborator, Dr. Kirkenthal. One is me. I'm on my

PhD student in my postdoc. So the four of us driving for nine hours and then three of us are very into musicals and singing. And one is not. Some of us just blasting music and screaming and singing the whole time. And the poor postdoc, he was sitting there and trying to write his papers, ignoring us the whole way. And we're trying to lure him in like, please, let's sing. You can learn how to sing. He's like, no. He sits in the back of the car.

while we stand for nine hours on the way. Oh, wow. That is amazing. I love both of these examples. I think this wall of rejection is amazing and really important. I think just this idea of normalizing rejection, because I think those first few that you get in your early career as a student, as a postdoc, they are hard to get over.

For sure. And I think the key is maybe don't take it personal. It's not a personal attack of your integrity or your science. A lot of the times for your manuscript peer review or grant proposal review, it's more, I would think it as a way to help you improve your science and improve your writing, improve the way you communicate.

So if you the least personal you think of it, the better and easier for you to accept it as a way just to help you move your career forward. Definitely. And I think it also helps seeing your advisor. These people who are more distinguished and advanced in science also have these rejections up on the wall. So you're not alone there, too. Oh, yeah. There's nobody who gets everything the first time they applied ever. I mean, we all get rejected all the time.

And the more you submit, the more you get rejected. And the more you get now rejected. I love this. And I love this idea, just this vision I have in my head of the four of you cruising down for nine hours in Australia, listening to musicals and belting your way along. It's very funny. Do you have a favorite musical that you like to sing along to?

The Miz is definitely my favorite. Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, and some recent ones. I think that's wonderful. Now, does your lab do karaoke? Do you have an opportunity to showcase this talent outside of this one trip? We didn't do karaoke per se, but our department sometimes during the holiday celebration, they have bands like the grad students have their own little music gathering.

They're all very talented. They play like six different instruments to grad students and then they can form a little band and they sing and perform at a holiday party. That's amazing. Well, you'll have to join in as one of the backup singers or something just to... Why not? I think it's okay just blasting away in our own car. We should butcher the ears of other people in the department.

Well, I think this is amazing. And I think it showcases like you highlight just this multifaceted nature of scientists that you can be these creative people, these musicians and have these different interests and hobbies as well.

Yeah, they're all good. I mean, a lot of them have lots of talent outside of the scientific career. They are good photographers. And especially in our field, there's a lot of good underwater photographers, wildlife photographers, artists. You never find the lack of talent in this group.

I think it's wonderful. And I think these field trips are a good opportunity to discover new things about the people that you work with. And I think having this community is tremendously valuable for doing the science that you do, because you need to have this tight knit community tackling these big questions that you're trying to solve. So if we took away the barriers that normally hold you and your group back, Jingchen,

If funding, staff, technology, feasibility, time, whatever the case may be, were not a problem, what is the one research question that you would want to answer most? You know, for now, it changes all the time. But right now, the really burning question I want to answer, but I can't, is to understand the molecular mechanism behind this symbiosis establishment when the organisms are in their larval stage. Like what happened in the initial contact at that stage?

But right now, since we study non-mortal organisms and I'm in Colorado, not near the ocean, it's a bit hard to raise these organisms to find out the best condition to raise them so they can spawn, so we can get larvae from them and study them from the very beginning of the symbiosis establishment.

And that's a big challenge. And I don't think we're planning to do that anytime sooner. But if there's no barrier, that would be the first thing I want to do. Sounds like you need another sabbatical closer to an ocean. Yes. Well, this is a fascinating project. And I think this question of what is happening that allows this symbiosis to occur is a fascinating one. Do you have ideas of what might be happening?

I think there's a lot of, like I said, initial recognition, molecular level recognition that is happening because we know some of these organisms can distinguish their own partner algae versus the other closely related ones that they don't live together. So there must be some very interesting

intricate interaction at the molecular level for them to recognize each other and take some strains into their tissue, let them grow, but reject others or digest the others. But we just don't know right now. It's a big mystery. Yeah, exactly.

Well, Jingjun, thank you so much for giving us something to ponder today for me and our listeners. And we always like to end by talking about advice for everybody out there who might be on their own scientific journey or other endeavors in life. Do you have a piece of advice that really helped you that you could share with them today? Yeah, I think that's also I

I got inspired from my own work in these symbiotic systems. I would advise early career scientists out there to work with others as much as you can, especially work with the ones who have different opinions than you. You might find different inspirations and have more creative projects that way. I like that advice. I think finding these people who maybe think a little bit differently, have these different perspectives can help kind of challenge how you think about things and give you some fresh ideas as well. Definitely.

Well, is there any other last piece of advice or a last note of inspiration that you'd like to leave everybody with at the end of our conversation today?

I think just to contradict the stereotype of scientists that we work alone, our loners work in our own lab. I think nowadays it's hard to do science without collaboration because you only know a piece of knowledge, maybe a very narrow field in your own brain. And if you want to answer any big questions, you really have to get expertise from people who know different fields than you do. So I think nowadays science cannot progress without collaboration, working together as a community.

I think that is so important and important for people to realize you aren't going to be by yourself if you pursue a career in science. It's, I think, like you just said, just not possible anymore. I think things are becoming more interdisciplinary. These larger scale studies where you need multiple collaborators are becoming more and more prevalent. Yeah, definitely. Well, wonderful message for our listeners out there. If they want to learn more about you, Jingjun, or the research that you're doing, what is the best way for them to do so?

The easiest way is to Google my name and then you'll probably find my lab website. And there you can find my email, my contact information, people in my lab, different projects we do. That's probably the easiest. Excellent. Well, listeners, definitely take some time to peruse the website and learn more about the amazing work that Jingjing and her team are doing there. And

And thank you so much for joining us today and sharing a bit of your story, Jingtoon. It's been a pleasure to have you. Likewise. You're very welcome. Thank you for inviting me. It's been wonderful to chat with you. And listeners, always great to have you here with us as well. We hope you join us again next time for another episode of People Behind the Science.