Made a science pilgrimage to St. Anthony Falls Lab the other day! It’s right next to a dammed part of the Mississippi River, and uses the water flow to run large-scale hydrology and geomorphology experiments. Part of the river can essentially be diverted to run *through* the building!

Lovely visit to @uconn.bsky.social last week! Learned a lot about low-cost nitrate and ozone sensors 😮👏

It worked here too! Some cells grew during the day, some grew during the night, and some grew the whole time.

Then we tested it in the real world, using salt marsh sediment from Cape Cod. The rich microbial community got one amino acid during the sunlit daytime, and the other during the dark nighttime.

Turns out, it works! We validated the approach with E. coli, which could incorporate both amino acids (shown with red and green dyes, alongside the blue showing all cells...)