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Wayne Riekhof

@wayneriekhof.bsky.social
540 followers 520 following 447 posts

Biochemist pretending real hard that I’m a microbiologist, when I actually wish I was an entomologist. I research, teach, and serve at Cornhusker U. GBR!

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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
These 7 cicadas were collected in Columbia and St. Louis, MO in 1998 during a huge emergence of Broods IV & XIX. Anyone out there doing pop gen, etc that could use them? I’ll send them to you.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Spell-check, y'all. "Protien" and "Altenretively" are kinda distracting from your message 😬
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
Same vibe…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
I still keep one in my office!
A blue Smith-Corona electric typewriter from circa 1970 sits on the uncommonly tidy desk of a middle-aged midwestern biology professor.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Jill wondered if maybe it’s a picture book 🤷‍♂️😬😂
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Absolutely! I am working on getting the ms in final form for BioRxiv and then (probably) JBC, hopefully by early January. I’ll be in touch 👍🏻
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Did my semi-annual perusal of my Facebook feed and saw an ad for books from Springer. One of these is not like the others…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
We just pulled Vps13 out of a screen for strains defective in retrograde PM to ER lyso-PC transport! So very apropos at the moment. Super interesting structure in general too, looks like a lipid slip n’ slide!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Nebraska and Iowa are both EPSCoR and INBRe states so…isn’t that already factored in? We already get a little bump relative to population size so 🤷‍♂️
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
I thought and thought, how do I know that name? Former student? Social media? 🤔 So I searched on here, and wouldn’t you know!?!? I knew I’d seen that name. And we don’t know each other at all, either, but that just makes it more surprising how small the world can be!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
One of my kids had a band concert tonight at Lincoln Southwest HS, and as I was waiting to file into the gym, I noticed a LSW alum from 2012 who was highlighted as a Science Olympiad winner. Name was familiar… @celestelabedz.bsky.social
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Reposted by Wayne Riekhof
George Wallace @mrgeorgewallace.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
I have been given the shiny and very real War Stopper Award by USA Pickleball because I have stopped so many dozens of wars and whatnot. I am honored that my war stopping has been noticed by the foremost pickleball organization in the world.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Get it?
A visual chemistry pun in which the letters “PhD” are attached at the 1 and 4 positions of a benzene ring, and another with crude drawings of garments one might wear on one’s lower half are attached at the 1 and 4 positions of a separate benzene ring.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
About to drive across town in a snowstorm to pick this up. Typewriter #9 for the collection, early ‘60’s Olivetti Lettera 32. Same model as the one Cormac McCarthy typed ~5 million words on. Now I can write my own Blood Meridian! That’s how this works, right?
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Obligatory…
media.tenor.com
a man is standing in front of a sign that says ' usted leadership for a stronger america '
ALT: a man is standing in front of a sign that says ' usted leadership for a stronger america '
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
I just deadlifted 350 lbs…
media.tenor.com
a man wearing a camouflage hat says so i got that going for me
ALT: a man wearing a camouflage hat says so i got that going for me
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
ASBMB must have cringed at a later date and taken that down since it now 404’s. But yeah that was a doozie.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Bakin’ bacon…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Some nice thoughts here. Of course Meselson and Stahl (my personal favorite) make an appearance, as well as Nirenberg and Matthaei and many others. If you need inspiration today to keep plugging along (which I do!), this is for you. www.asimov.press/p/beautiful-...
asimov.press
What Makes an Experiment Beautiful?
A beautiful experiment is not just a reflection of human ingenuity but also efficient science.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Lincoln, NE last night. 48 years old, lived my entire life in Missouri, Michigan, Colorado, and Nebraska, and that was my first time ever seeing the aurora!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Frank likes to roll around under the ottoman, and with the color and pattern of the rug, he’s pretty effectively camouflaged…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
My wife sent me a pic of the wiener bros and I think it would make a good album cover. Theres a vibe…
Two wiener dogs sitting in a chair, looking charismaticA headshot of Wham from the late 80’s
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
This is the line I highlight as my favorite in all of biomedical literature when I teach DNA structure in my spring Molecular Biology course. Lol…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Lucy and her mantis friend at age 5, and hissing cockroach friends at age 13… I think she may have inherited the entomologist gene from me!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
The many faces of my little red weenie boy, George, who is 5 years old today!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
Sometimes I wonder how all the different coat colors and patterns in, say, Dachshunds came to be. Then I see posts like the one below and it’s like “oh, yeah, one popped up in a litter randomly and was selected.” To paraphrase Monod: What‘s true of Lima beans is true of wiener dogs…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
No harm other than a strip of sod torn out, but the chunks of wheel and body panel they left in the yard after fleeing on the rim…well, we’re glad no one was hurt 😬
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
The person who lost control of their car and drove through my yard late Wednesday did manage to miss the 12-foot skeletons and for that, I am grateful 🙏
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
George Beadle is kneeling with the dog. This was just before he went to work with Ed Tatum. Charles Burnham is top left, went on to U of Minnesota and worked on cereal breeding of various sorts.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
Don’t forget George Beadle and the dog (whose name I used to know but have forgotten)
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Reposted by Wayne Riekhof
The Onion @theonion.com · 10/10/2025
Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year theonion.com/third-amendment-rights…
Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Wanna know how I know I’m making an impact? Anonymous students have started to tell jokes I make in class back to me on the whiteboard on my office door… 🤓 🧪 😂
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
Kitchen smells pretty good right now. Whole house, actually!
Apple pie, golden brown from cinnamon and the Maillard reaction, sitting on a stovetop to cool.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
There used to be a fast neutron source in the basement of the PRL, and a bunch of different high specific activity radionuclides related to nuclear weapons testing, but they may have been disposed of in the 80’s or 90’s.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Reposting this to remind me to talk about it in class…Today was on nitrogen fixing bacteria that live in the fungus gardens of leaf cutter ants. So I guess this could be part of the microbial physiology physiology course with a strong myrmecological theme…
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Reposted by Wayne Riekhof
The New York Times @nytimes.com · 26/09/2025
“Twilight Override,” the latest solo project by Jeff Tweedy, who leads the long-running band Wilco, is a triple album that earns every minute. “I just thought that it flies in the face of a culture that’s gotten faster, more surface level,” he said. nyti.ms/4ngMQgu
Jeff Tweedy, wearing clear-framed glasses and a plaid shirt. A headline reads: "How Jeff Tweedy Made a New Magnum Opus." Photo by Lyndon French for The New York Times
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
Yet again, never having learned how to swim remains a net positive as far as I’m concerned.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
Last of the hot peppers for the season! Scotch Bonnet, Habenero, Jalapeño, and Habenada (a mutant Habenero that has a defective capsaicin biosynthetic pathway.) Turning some of these into jam shortly!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
I noticed the same thing when I grew some last year, then realized they’re closely related to Hibiscus and it made sense. Can’t go wrong with battered and deep fried okra!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
I’ve told students for years now, a good term paper idea for an evolution/pop gen course or a music course (or both!) would be a thorough analysis of the claims in Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” through the lens of genes x environment interactions. There’s a lot to mine, there.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Guess no one in the NYT puzzle writers room has ever force-fed a mouse. Sad.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
I think D very narrowly edges out G for me, but a different day might find that switched...
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
Caveat: this only works in rats that have been engineered to express a cocaine responsive ion channel in the brain. Probably not going to stop a given human from using or help someone get clean any time in the near future...but still very, very cool approach!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
...I am teaching this semester (as BIOS 440/840.) So this paper will be the next subject of our tri-weekly Journal Club, every third Friday in the class this semester. A classic, still well worth a read! www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
microbiologyresearch.org
Dependency on Medium and Temperature of Cell Size and Chemical Composition during Balanced Growth of Salmonella typhimurium
Summary: Ceil mass, the average number of nuclei/cell and the content of RNA and DNA were studied in (Salmonella typhimurium during balanced (steady state) growth in different media. These quantities ...
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
Very nice writeup on someone I've admired and learned from for many years. I didn't know he had passed until catching up on This Week in Microbiology driving to campus this morning. His 1958 paper on Salmonella growth rates basically founded the formal study of microbial physiology, which...
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Festival of capsaicin at the house tonight…
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Text from my daughter giving @lukelukeluke.bsky.social vibes 🍄‍🟫🍄🍄‍🟫🍄 😂
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
True. I’ve been schlepping this around for 25+ years now.
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
It’s a shame I can’t go back in time like 25 or 30 years and ask the yeast genome sequencing and KO collection folks to use something other than S288c derivatives & designer deletion strains. The BY474x strains suck!
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Wayne Riekhof @wayneriekhof.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
Yeah, still got it! (Doing yeast genetics with my own hands, that is.) Measuring mutagenesis efficiency by EMS in 2 S. cerevisiae wild-types, by loss of CAN1 function leading to canavanine resistant colonies. Does the BY474x background have a mismatch repair defect? 🤔
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