We close this season with our hosts sharing a retrospective conversation about the start of the Absolute Gene-ius series, the wonderful guests hosted, favorite moments, and lessons learned. In addition to the season recap, Cassie and Jordan also interview each other to extract some “Cassie’s Career Corner” insights about their respective backgrounds and how they each ended up in their current roles. Join us to get to know your hosts a bit better and to reflect on this amazing inaugural season!

For this episode we host another of Thermo Fisher Scientific’s own. Dave Bauer is a PhD-educated Application Scientist specializing in qPCR and digital PCR. His knack for using analogies to explain difficult concepts helps illuminate the benefits of digital PCR and the statistical aspects of this analytical method. This is a great overview episode that also touches on specific applications such as SNP detection. We also learn about Dave’s career path, hear some valuable advice, and get a sense of how poor our intuitions can be at evaluating probabilities.

This episode features an easygoing bioinformatics expert. Our conversation with Nikhil Ram Mohan, Staff Scientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is an easy entry into the dry-lab work of bioinformatics and how this informs and augments wet-lab molecular biology work. He tells us about his use of digital PCR to analyze biobank samples, how his first visit to another country was his move to the U.S. for grad school, about his love of teaching, and about being a new father. Check out this interesting episode, fueled by an interesting guest!

We once again welcome two guests to this episode where we talk about using digital PCR and other methods to study microbial life and survivability in extreme environments. Dr. Brandi Kiel Reese and Lydia Hayes-Guastella from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab at the University of South Alabama tell us all about their work collecting and analyzing samples from places remote as Antarctica and the Mariana Trench. They share what working in such unique locations is like, how samples are collected and analyzed, and what they hope to glean from such studies. As always, you’ll also get to know a bit more about them and their personal stories too!

This mid-season message from Cassie includes the announcement of the arrival of Jordan’s first baby, which will mean a short delay in production of the second half of the season. We will be back soon though with more great conversations with the Gene-iuses using dPCR to progress their science. In the meantime, we hope you’ll constructive feedback via [email protected] or in a review on whatever service you stream us through. We also hope you’re tell a friend about us so that they can catch up on back episodes during the break. Stay curious!

In this easy-to-listen-to episode we talk with Ray Ketchum from Agrinos and learn about how he and his team are using microbial consortia to produce products that improve plant health and crop yields. The conversation covers how dPCR helps them quantify individual species within a complex mixture of more than 20 bacteria, which are a mix of aerobes and anaerobes. Ray also shares his career path journey and some insightful lessons learned along the way.

For this episode we host two guests. Corbin Schuster and Zoltan Varga from the Zebrafish International Resource Center at the University of Oregon join us to talk about why zebrafish are an ideal model organism for genetic studies and to tell us about some of the challenges of creating and maintaining thousands of genetically unique lines of the animal. The career corners part of this conversation is also super inspiring and insightful.

Come meet Patrick Hanington and learn about his work in parasitology. We talk about how dPCR is advancing his team’s work in monitoring public and recreational waters for parasites, including schistosomes, which cause swimmer’s itch. You’ll also get some great career advice, funny sample-collection stories, and some unexpected movie references and recommendations.

For this episode we keep things in house with Marcia Slater. Her more than 20 years of experience in PCR are evident in how well she covers the history of power of digital PCR. Join for some dPCR fundamentals, the ever-present Gene-ius gems on career development, and stories about alpaca farming!

Join us to kick off the series in this conversation with Dr. Sarah Philo, a recent PhD graduate working in wastewater-based epidemiology to track SARS-CoV-2 and antimicrobial resistance. We talk about the science, the joys of working with sewage samples, pandemic-era academics, career development, and more!