Hi, I'm Thi Nguyen with the Science Communication Lab.
This year, we got to talk to all the presenters for Share Your Research.
So glad we get to hear their voices and learn a little bit more about them.
Today, we're talking to Dr. Dyna.
Dr. Dyna, could you introduce yourself?
Of course, hi!
My name is Dylan McClung, a.k.a.
Dyna Cockus Rose.
I'm a microbiologist and a drag queen.
And I study bacteria that live in the soil,
and I used the interactions
that bacteria have to discover
a brand new antibiotic that I named Dynaplanin.
And all of this was part of my PhD
work at the University of California, Berkeley, where I recently graduated.
And Dyna, what motivated you to get into science?
Great question.
I feel like I've always wanted to help people in some way.
I originally wanted to be a medical doctor,
but I realized pretty quickly that I cannot handle blood of any sort.
So when I was doing
my biology major in college, at the College of New Jersey, I started pivoting
more towards research and understanding what a research lab was like.
And one of the new faculty; her name is Dr. KT Elliott.
She worked on bacteria and genetics.
And I thought, “Oh bacteria, cool!
Like that's medical!”
Turns out we did nothing at all medical in the lab.
But it really...
developed... I developed this passion for microbiology
inside this lab and realized that there is so much
that microbes do that we don't really appreciate.
As you started getting into research and looking at some of these questions,
what is an early discovery that you made?
Well...
I mentioned my college research lab — Dr. KT Elliott’s lab,
and we were studying some genetic components.
Particularly, I was interested in how this one
gene called yqgF— how it might function within cells.
We didn't really know; it was called a hypothetical protein.
And so I was studying
how it might relate to DNA repair,
and fixing some breaks within the DNA.
And part of that process
is doing an experiment called, “a transformation frequency experiment,”
where we can add some DNA, and give it to cells and measure
how many cells actually take up that DNA, and put it onto their chromosome.
And I was running this experiment for months,
and my results were not coming back
the way that my advisor expected them to.
And she was very confused.
And she kept just asking me to repeat these experiments.
And I realized...
It ended up coming down to her watching me, from the start,
do the entire experiment — from streaking out... excuse me...
Streaking out strains from a freezer stock, all the way to like performing it.
And as I was
streaking out these stocks from the freezer,
she realized I was using the wrong tube as my reference
the entire time.
And I didn't realize, because there were actually
two different strains that we call “wildtype,” meaning unmutated.
Kind of our reference standard.
And one of them was for a particular collection
and another was for a different collection.
And so what I learned is there is something called isogenic strains,
meaning that you need to have exactly one
mutation different between your strains to compare them.
And these wildtypes were not isogenic.
They had lots of different mutations.
So I needed to focus on just the one group at a time
and this other group at a time.
And I had to repeat, basically, a year's worth of experiments
in like one month.
But it taught me to be very...
You know, pay attention to what's going on,
and figure out what exactly I'm working with at all times.
So that I'm not making crazy mistakes like that again.
Yeah.
Research is all about learning from mistakes and from...
experiments that didn't work, right?
Speaking of adding DNA,
it looks like you've added DNA to your outfit today.
Could you tell us a little bit about this?
Of course, yeah!
So my drag persona — Dyna Cockus Rose — is all about science.
I'm super inspired by the work that I do as a researcher,
and I wanted to incorporate that in a more creative way,
and communicate science through the art of drag.
So Deinococcus is actually...
the group, a genus, of organisms.
The most famous is called,
“Deinococcus radiodurans,” which is actually in the Guinness
Book of World Records for most radiation-resistant life form.
And I thought “Deino” and “Dylan” sounded kind of similar.
I kind of connected to that.
So I chose “Dyna Cockus” as my first and middle name.
“Rose” actually comes from my first drag mother, who was the first person
who put me into drag.
Kind of a mentor in the drag scene.
And so her last name is Rose — full name Sandra Rose.
So I try to incorporate science into my drag as much as possible.
So this is a DNA bodysuit.
I'm kind of like a chromosome.
Got my two arms, my two legs, like a human chromosome.
Yeah, yeah!
I wanted to represent DNA in a fashionable and fun way.
You've done it really well.
-Thank you! -As a person...
in science who expresses yourself in a way that incorporates science,
what is one thing that you want people to know about being a scientist that
they may not know?
I think...
Something that I always get as a drag performer
when I tell people that I'm a scientist is, “Oh, well that's boring.
Oh, that's so dry.”
And I don't see that at all, right?
I find science fascinating.
I find learning about the world so intriguing.
And so I want to try to present that
as much as possible with my drag character.
And what I want other people to understand is that science...
and scientists, in particular, are so diverse.
There are so many different kinds of people.
There are people like me who do drag.
I'm not the only drag artist who's a scientist.
There are some people who are really athletic,
some people who are really personable, some people who are really shy,
and like the video games, or board games, but there are so many different
kinds of people who do science for a variety of different reasons.
And...
I think all of these people are great and really cool.
So I don't see us as boring.
And so I want people to realize that
that we are complex people who have our own personalities,
and we're not all, you know, cookie-cutter.
Yeah.
And it all contributes to the science that we do, too.
-Absolutely. -If you encounter...
a young person who wanted to learn about getting into science
and being a scientist in your field, what are some of the greatest things
that you would tell them, or what would you tell them about
some of the greatest things in your field, and some of the challenging things
that they can expect?
So I work, in particular, on a group of bacteria
called, “the Rare Actinomycetes,” which are understudied bacteria.
They mostly live in the soil.
And the one I study, in particular, is called, “Couchioplanes caeruleus.”
And what is great
about these microbes, like I talked about in my presentation,
is that there's a lot of potential for them to produce
these natural product molecules that could be antibiotics or antifungals.
There's tons of opportunity to find new drugs and medicines for us,
which is the very exciting part about the field.
In addition to all the complex interactions
that they might have in nature.
But what is particularly challenging is that they are so understudied.
So while there's a lot of opportunity, there's also a lot of challenges.
It's kind of a double-edged sword.
So for reference, Couchioplanes caeruleus
had exactly nine papers published about it.
I have published the 10th paper,
once mine goes live.
And E. coli, for example, has 400,000 papers published on it.
So there's a lot of information that we don't know about Couchioplanes,
which really limited what I was able to accomplish with this bacterium.
But again, super exciting, because there are a lot of unanswered questions,
and we might find something really cool that nobody has ever discovered before.
That's really an excitement —
this idea of publishing the 10th paper in a field.
-You really are contributing new knowledge. -Yeah, absolutely.
I think that's one of the coolest parts
about doing a PhD, honestly, is...
I realized at some point during
maybe my fourth or fifth year that like
I always knew that research was about discovery, but I never thought about it
in the terms of... I am creating new knowledge
for somebody else to then learn from and build off of, which I think
was super empowering and really exciting, and something that I needed
during the hard research times I was going through.
So if you're tuning in,
please check out Dyna's presentation of Share Your Research.
Thank you so much for joining us and talking with us today.