Virologist Jeremy Kamil macroliter shares his relatively upbeat perspective on the viral threats we face today.
There are two versions: a more classical vaccinia-like vaccine, which is a little bit higher risk for people who have eczema or other skin issues. Then there's the newer one, which is called Jynneos. I think it's manufactured in Europe. That's the one that the CDC is making available for immunization to high-risk people.
I came up with"macroliter" because microliter was taken already. It's just a pun. There's no such thing as a macroliter, but it is funny. I didn't put a lot of thought into it. By following people who are productive and/or other curious people in fields related to yours, you can learn quickly and come up with techniques that save your grad students a little bit of time in the lab. Then COVID-19 hit, and that only underscored how powerful Twitter could be.
It was really interesting at the very outset of the pandemic, when you saw selflessness, just people saying,"Hey, this is a public health emergency. My lab developed these standards or controls or tools, and we're happy to share them." It was a great way to connect with other people and bring resources that are unique and powerful to your community, even if you are far away geographically from somewhere else.
When they shut down our campus — I think it was actually Friday the 13th — the chancellor asked the virologists,"Hey, do you know what RT-PCR is, or RT-qPCR, real-time PCR?" For us, it's not an exciting new technique. It's a pretty boilerplate basic thing to set up. It's not just used in virology. It's used to look at gene expression differences. We were like, yeah, of course, it's not hard to set up an RT-PCR assay.
I knew from people in my field that folks knew how to do this using panels and enrichment strategies. I just sent an email to my department chair and the vice chancellor for research saying,"Hey, we should really start thinking about sequencing this." The vice chancellor loved the idea and said,"Just get it done. I have your back."
What I noticed is that, even though LSU Health Shreveport, at that time, wasn't known for viral genomics or anything like that, the edge we had was that we shared rapidly. Other campuses had been generating data and amassing sequences, but they weren't sharing them. People learn lessons by living life. As a scientist, many people learn the lesson to hold on to your data until you can get something for it. Those are the ingrained practices among most scientists.
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