Earlier this year, University of Chicago assistant professor Sean Crosson donned a cowboy hat and rode a giant foam bacterium across a stage as part of a student research presentation. The audience broke into laughter.
While exploring the "hidden biology" of undescribed signaling pathways in the bacteria, Caulobacter crescentus, Crosson's group manages to share quite a few laughs, and the lab leader is often the ringleader. "People in my lab work hard and they're serious about it, but no one's too intense," says Crosson in the fading drawl of his native Texas. "I want people to have fun. We're not here to be miserable."
As a PhD student in Keith Moffat's University of Chicago lab, Crosson used X-ray crystallography to solve both the dark state1 and photo-excited2 structures of the light, oxygen, or voltage (LOV) domain of the plant protein phototropin, a mediator of the light orientation behavior of seed ...
