Mara Duncan

@mcduncanlab.bsky.social

1567 Followers 255 Following

Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. I post photos of my cat and garden, and helpful tips for running a lab. Thoughts my own.

A faded photocopy of an image of young Navin looking confused in lab with the phrase 'What is the NP control?' in comic sans written underneath.
Red cherry tomatoes hiding behind greenery.
A not great EM image of saccharomyces with finger-like extensions seeming to emanate from the plasma membrane into the cytosol.
A shelf with cookbooks Marthi, new basics, better homes, japanese as well as a bash cookbook and numerical recipes in fortran second edition.
A summary of grant outcomes the middle ones says with drawn by IC Other version Encumbered.
A screen grab showing some of the posts about Francesca's labs lovely star protocol.
A screen grab of an article from my lab listing the citations and social media scores.
A screen grab for an e-mail from Thermo offering me publication quality antibodies.
A screen grab from MBoC where most of the screen is frame and just a little window of text.
A diagram of the pulley assembly for an orbital shaker.
A photo of a grimy upper and lower bearing.
A screen grab congratulating me for submitting a proposal.
Advertisement for the Michigan pioneers fellow program.
A title of a paper 'Logic of the Yeast Metabolic Cycle: Temporal Compartmentalization of Cellular Processes by Benjamin P. Tu, Andrzej Kudlicki, Maga Rowicka, and Steven L. McKnight
Data from a 1944 paper that unless I’m wrong is the one that showed DNA is the genetic material. The data is all pluses and minuses,
Two petri plates cut down the center.
A petri plate with quadrants plated.
A tortie cat in the sun of golden hour. She looks pensively directly at the camera.
Images from a leukocyte migrating out of a vessel, it goes through an extremely small constriction
A slide with generic bullets on the left and informative bullets on the right overview=AZT a novel inhibitor of HIV Introdcution=why do we need inhibitors of HIV Background=reverse transcriptase as a druggable viral target conclusions and results=AZT inhibition of RT in vitro and in vivo future directions=challenges for AZT in human therapeutics.
A slide entitled azt a novel inhibitor of HIV with bullets why do we need inhibitors of HIV reverse transcriptase as a 'druggable' target AZT inhibition ot RT in vitro and in vivo Challenges for AZT in human therapeutics
A slide that reads overview introduction background results conclusions future directions
A book with a dust cover that reads Simon and Shuster's guide to Pokeman. The subtitle reads an easy-to-use- field guide to 350 species with more than 1000 spectacular full-color illustrations and information on 'poke' anatomy and behavior, species' primary activity, habitat, ecological significance, and much, much more. This dust cover is clearly a modification of a different guide, the word poke is clearly inserted over something else as is pokemon. A particularly well-informed reader would recognize this as Simon and shuster's guide to insects copyright 1981 when I was a child and completely obsessed with insects.
A calendar labeled march with some funky cute birds on it.
A set of three mini calendars. January has all but one day crossed out and a green foil star. February has all days crossed out and a gold foil star. March has one day crossed out and no stars.
An office thermostat set at 70 reading 78.
A screen grab of a photoshop image with blue green and red panels and then a layers menu with file names of micrograph images
A list of seasons with additional winters and falls, some are squished.
CASE 5.-Boy, aged 14. Admitted May 6,1941. Staphylococcal septicaemia with early osteomyelitis of left femur following fall 6 days before. aureus. Blood-culture grew Staph. Given sulphathiazole 64 g. between May 7 and 12 with little benefit. May 17: left hip-joint explored, no abscess found, joint contained little sterile fluid with polymorphs in it. May 22 : blood and albumin in urine. Embolic pustular rash. Extension by skin traction applied to left leg. May 30: X rays showed osteitis left femoral neck with involvement of joint and destruction of alveolar walls. Discharge from wound grew Staph. aureus. June 6 : still extremely ill, with temperature rising to 10l F., much pain in left hip and thigh ; urine still contained blood and albumin. Hb. 74% ; red cells 4,290,000. Bloodurea 23 mg. per 100 c.cm.
A hexagonal life raft
A photo of two monthly calendars. The January one has cats and has most days checkmarked. There is a green foil star on the January calendar. February is empty. It has a green background and frogs.
A graphical of a sequence alignment showing what looks like perfect alignment.
A photo of some bearing poking up out of a sealed metal peice with three holes.
A photo of a tiny calendar with many days crossed off. There are cute cats on the calendar. There is a sheet of gold stars nearby.
A photo of mini January calendar. All of the work-days of the month have a check-mark, indicating I did a writing session. The calendar is decorated with cats.
A chart with an axis of relative frequency and terms like Convolutional neural network, Random Forest, Large Language model, K-neared neighbors.
A photo of a small piece of paper entitled January with a 6 by 5 grid. The grid is surrounded by cat illustrations. The boxes corresponding to Jan 2 and Jan5-9 are checked and the last box in the two top rows has a hand written star on it.
An XKCD entitled sauropods. In the top panel, a long necked dinosaur is shown, it is exed out. In the bottom panel two short-necked dinosaurs are shown and one snake. The caption reads thanks to modern palenotolgical reconstructions we now know thta most sauropds has short necks and all those extra vertebrae belonged to the sauropod colony's queen.
A screen grab of a web site with Principal Investigators David Drubin and Georjana Barnes with visiting professor Tom Pollard
A checklist: 1. Update and print 2017 notebook: ___ 2. Review administrative e-mails, schedule any needed training, committee meetings etc: ___ 3. Throw out media bottles older than 12 months (except –biotin, –iron or other expensive media): ___ 4. Wipe down your shelves: ___ 5. Organize your buffers: ___ 6. Wipe down your pipettor holder: ___ 7. Wipe down your benchtop and the drawer faces under your bench: ___ 8. Check and discard any 50 or 15 ml falcons that are poorly labeled, cracked or old: ___ 9. Discard random items from benchtop: ___ 10. Clean pipettors: ___ 11. Check calibration of pipettors: ___ 12. Clean 4C space: ___ 13. Clean coldroom space: ___ 14. Check -20 freezers for your pcr racks, racks of tubes or bottles, move to labeled boxes or discard: ___ 15. Check -80 freezer for racks of tubes or bottles, move to labeled boxes or discard: ___ 16. Discard paper from around desk: ___
A photo of some papers taped to the wall, one has cute cats and checkboxes and is labeled January. Another has empty stars and is labeled 2026. Behind is one labeled 2025 where some of the stars are filled.
A paper bag filled with plastic bags of cat treats, the paper bag is torn and the section with one handle is missing.
A photo of a box labeled folk art of bihar art activity, next tow three painted cards and one unpainted card. The cards depict elephants fish or horses in a simple style inspired by the traditional art of Bihar India.
A beeswarm plot of two samples with seemingly similar distribution and mean.
clathrin adapters drive phase separation in endocytosis and trafficking
A screen grab of notes from a metacognition paper with tons and tons of text. This is not my area of expertise.
A spreadsheet summarizing some papers. With entries title first author main lab year doi, main topic sub topic.
A nice tidy under the kitchen sink.
A screen grab that describes a deletion strain as not from the knockout collection but rather from the weathered and sturdy hands of one Lucas J. Marmorale, of city redacted.
A terrifying e-mail saying that the Signing Official XXX has rejected a grant application
A tortie tabby sitting next to pots on a windowsill giving a if looks could kill look.
A stack of white buckets.
A cozy Kitty sleeping on the bed on my legs
A screen grab reads: Sulfidic subterranean ecosystems are sustained by in situ primary production predominantly by chemoautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing microorganisms.
A screen grab of a folder labeled Mara>Teaching>CDB560_2024. Most of the files in the folder are powerpoint files with topics like Intro to single cell. The last one is a word document labeled notes for next year.
A image of a protein gel with black bands on white background.
A cat sitting dangerously close to a keyboard and mouse
A screen grab of microscopy data using a fire LUT.