Orphan Lab at Caltech

What a wonderful launch to our new "Science & Sunsets" series! Thanks so much to all who came to see us, and to everyone who helped make the event possible!

More info about KML at link in bio.

Happiest of holidays from Caltech's Kerckhoff Marine Lab, all decked out for the

Ciona, the sea sq**rt. Thomas Hunt Morgan had studied embryology and developmental biology of Ciona in his early years, before the work in fruit flies and genetics that would earn him the Nobel Prize. He returned to the study of Ciona when he moved to Caltech, and it formed a major part of his experiments at KML. He and his colleague Albert Tyler would go down to Corona del Mar from Pasadena every weekend; the late Caltech geneticist Norman Horowitz recalled, "Every Saturday morning we went down, usually in Tyler's Model-A Ford, and came back Sunday night... We would always stop at the Newport Yacht Club on the way...and pull Ciona off the pilings where they grow. And Morgan would set up these big arrays, big matrices... and he would make all the crosses."

There are still Ciona on the pilings by the yacht club, a living reminder of this pioneering work in developmental biology more than 75 years ago.

1,2,5,6,7: Ciona, Newport Bay, 2022.
3: Thomas Hunt Morgan and Albert Tyler in the lab at Corona del Mar, 1931.
4: THM and group at KML, 1930s. Tyler is second from left.
8: One of Morgan's final papers, Biol. Bull., 88(1):50-62, 1945.
📷 3,4: Caltech Archives

Among the Caltech scientists to work at Kerckhoff Marine Lab in its early years was Linus Pauling, shown here with his wife Ava Helen in Corona del Mar in 1924 or 1925. (He would have been a grad student at this time.)

Caltech purchased the marine lab in 1930, and in the summer of 1935, Pauling spent time collecting keyhole limpets and isolating hemocyanin from them. Hemocyanin, the oxygen-carrying protein in mollusks, is a copper protein and makes their blood blue. Pauling used the hemocyanin collected from limpets near KML to develop the methods he would soon use to measure the magnetic properties of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in humans and other mammals. For more information on this important breakthrough in our understanding of cellular respiration, based in part on work at KML, see link in bio.

1. The Paulings at CdM, Oregon State Univ. Archives.
2,4,5: Pauling's lab notebook pages, OSU Archives.
3: keyhole limpet, CdM, 2022.
6: Pauling at CdM, 1940.
7: Pauling and Coryell, PNAS, 1936.

It's been a busy week at KML, as moved in...and then was filmed for an upcoming CNN documentary. Captura will be using labs and other facilities at KML to test and scale up their carbon capture technology, based on methods developed at Caltech. For more information, see link in bio.

Welcome, Captura, to KML!

Seagrass sampling! One of the active research projects currently ongoing at Caltech's Kerckhoff Marine Lab is a study of our local seagrass meadow, focusing on the microbial communities of the seagrass rhizosphere. More info at link in bio.

Divers collect seagrass and its surrounding sediment in plastic tubes called pushcores. Samples are processed back on shore at the lab, and some plants are also incubated in the seawater tanks on the patio at KML for longer term experiments and monitoring. We hope these studies will have both local and global impact. Seagrasses are an important part of the local ecosystem in Newport Bay, providing shelter for juvenile fish and invertebrates. They also play an important role globally in carbon burial in the marine environment.

This work in the is generously supported by the Resnick Institute, and sampling is done under permit from CADFW.

Since 1930, Caltech's Kerckhoff Marine Lab, located on the Newport Harbor entrance channel in Corona del Mar, has been a center of discovery and exploration. Follow our new KML instagram account to learn more about the lab's illustrious history and about the innovative science and engineering going on here today.

Recent work from the Orphan Lab!

Laboratory cultivation of hydrothermal vent microorganisms collected on Falkor in 2018 led to the discovery of a new species of microbe that hints at the evolutionary origin of eukaryotes: Candidatus Heimdallarchaeum aukensis, named after its environmental origin from the Auka hydrothermal vent field in the Pescadero Basin. Discovery of the new species has been published in February's issue of nature microbiology. The article has been made open access for everyone to read with partial support from SOI:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-01039-y