Orphan Lab at Caltech

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

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!

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