Hemdeep (00:12)
Welcome to Big Ideas in Microscale, the podcast where we explore groundbreaking research happening at the microscale where micro innovations makes a big impact. We're excited to showcase the incredible work being done by our users from around the world who are pushing the boundaries of microfluidics, lab on a chip, organ on a chip and beyond. Through these conversations, we hope to learn from their experiences, uncover their insight and bring their big ideas to a wider audience. So whether in a lab,

On the go, we're just curious about the future of microtechnology. Join us as we dive into big ideas at Microscale.

Welcome back to Big Ideas in Microscale. I'm your host, Hemdeep, co-founder of Creative CADWorks, CADWorks 3D, and ResinWorks 3D.

Robin (01:19)
And I'm Robin, co-host as well as the technical writer within the marketing team.

Hemdeep (01:23)
We're excited to start a new mini-series with our guest Jack Koch.

Robin (01:28)
Now Jack Koch is an assistant professor at the Aquatic Germoplasm and Genetic Resource Center in Louisiana State University Agriculture Center. His research focuses on developing cryopreservation pathways and germplasm repositories for aquatic species. Welcome, Jack.

Jack (01:47)
Hello. Thanks for having me.

Robin (01:50)
So I guess let's start off by diving a bit deeper into your research background. Can you describe your academic careers to date?

Jack (01:59)
Yeah. So I did my undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. got a bachelor's of science in marine biology. And then I traveled across the United States to Oregon State University where I got my PhD in integrative biology. And now I'm, like you said, an assistant professor at the Aquatic, Germ, Plasma and Genetic Resources Center. And when I arrived at the AGGRC,

I started off as a postdoctoral research associate there for three years, and then I've been an assistant professor for just over six months now.

Hemdeep (02:37)
So Jack, we had spoken a while back and I think that was our first introduction. And since that time, I think I've done a bit of research with the help of Robin of who you are and all the work that you've been doing. Whenever I speak to researchers is to find out where that aha moment was. You go through your undergraduate, post-grad, but where was that tipping point that happened for you where you've really found your niche in the type of research that you're doing?

Jack (03:07)
I say my path to where I am today has been a bit non-traditional in terms of the variety of projects that I've undertaken. For example, my PhD, I did some enzyme physiology, I did some genomics and some microbiology. And traditionally when you get a PhD or, and I'm not going to say most PhDs because everybody has their own journey, but

you might focus on one thing. your whole PhD might be in microbiology or a whole PhD might be in genomics. I had a couple of different topics that my dissertation covered. And then moving to Louisiana, I had no background in cryobiology at all, which is a good thing and maybe an opportunity for growth. I didn't have this preconceived notion of what cryopreservation was or the processes that need to happen. I...

got to be trained by the group I'm with now and got to figure things out on my own to form my own opinions and knowledge and information about that process. So the aha moment for me has always just been curiosity about the world around me. You it started from a young age. We would go to the beach every year as a family. My grandparents, my aunts and uncles would come down. You most people go to the beach and

like sunbathe or go swim in the water. But I had a seine net. And if you don't know what a seine net is, should, you know, maybe we can post a picture on the screen, but it's a giant net. They're about, I'd say 10 feet long by four feet high. So they're pretty big and there's posts on each side. The bottom half of the seine net, there's some weights and then the top half there are some floats. And so I brought a seine net to the beach with me as like a seven year old.

Robin (04:59)
Did you yourself bring it or was it like a family member had it and they like introduced it to you or was that just like you yourself?

Jack (05:07)
I think I brought it. We go into the little stores near the beachfront and I saw one and I wanted to try it out. So my parents bought it for me, but I was the one who would bring it with us every year. I would convince whoever would come out on the surf with me, my cousin, my grandpa, my grandma, my parents, whoever would drag the net to the surf with me to come drag it. And we'd catch fish and jellyfish and all sorts of things.

So I think that's one of the main drivers why I'm so curious about the outside. But it's more than just an aha moment, I'd say.

Hemdeep (05:42)
say that you lean on those experiences or you lean quite a bit on those experiences as you sort of decided where you were going to eventually do your post-grad work and further on as well.

Jack (05:55)
I guess I always knew that I wanted to end up near the coast. Yeah. University of North Carolina, Wilmington, their main campus is with no traffic. might be like a 10, 15 minute drive to the beach, which is incredible. Like you're right there going to Oregon state university. We were a little bit further from the beach. It's like an hour and a half. And I didn't go to OSU because of its proximity to the beach.

I went there for the person that mentored me in my PhD, Dr. Virginia Weiss. She's incredible. I didn't know that at the time, but she's a world renowned biologist in the field of coral biology. And I'd read some of her papers while I was working on my honors thesis at UNC Wilmington. And I reached out and things worked out well there. And then coming to Louisiana, again, it's more about mentorship opportunity and

training opportunity than it is like a location. And Virginia knew my boss, Dr. Terry Tiersch, got to come see the facility and was like, Jack, you would really fit in well here. Like you love building things and tinkering and that's what they do. So combining biology and technology is a big thing that I have come to build my program through at the AGGRC.

Hemdeep (07:13)
Amazing. think Robin did bit of stalking and found out that you were... Okay, sorry. Bad ⁓ choice of words. It's not stalking, but just did quite a bit of background dig on you and found that you are an avid wildlife photographer as well.

Robin (07:31)
At least you used to be. I'm not sure if you're still updated with it.

Hemdeep (07:33)
Are you using it?

Jack (07:33)
Okay.

Hemdeep (07:37)
What was that all about? Like, how far did you progress with that? Do you use that as a moment of just being able to decompress from a day or where is it now?

Jack (07:47)
Yeah, absolutely. I don't get out and shoot as much as I used to. That could be because it's a little bit warmer in Louisiana and it's not as nice to be outside. I wish I got out more. I still do get out. We had a once in a lifetime snowstorm here. We had 10 inches of snow in Louisiana. I got out and took some really cool pictures of snowflakes and I'm nowhere near, there's people who take very, very incredible pictures of snowflakes out there, but.

I have pictures of Baton Rouge snowflakes, which I think is pretty cool. I'll share it with you guys so you can pop it up on the screen if you want. I love taking pictures of wildlife landscapes, the night sky, because it all fascinates me and there's a lot of beauty out there. And yeah, it's totally a way for me to decompress.

Robin (08:35)
Totally unnecessary, but little shout out. I know for a fact that you also have a little store for your photography. So if anyone happens to be interested, there will be a link for it on our webpage.

Jack (08:49)
Yeah, I print all of my photos here at home. So it's not through a third party service. Like I have relatively large photo printer here and yeah, if anyone wants one, you're welcome to.

Hemdeep (09:03)
Look at this, this is so cool.

Robin (09:06)
So you mentioned it a little bit, but you joined AGGRC and how long ago was that when you started with them?

Jack (09:13)
Yeah, so was right after COVID, sort of was right after people were coming back from remote work. of 2021. Yeah, so it's just been four years now.

Robin (09:27)
And what is kind of like your specialization around the lab? They said that you're a good tinkerer and you work with lot of technology. So I'm going to assume it kind of leans in that direction, but you'll give us a better idea.

Jack (09:40)
Yeah, so they call me a corrupted biologist. My expertise is in invertebrate biology and invertebrates are anything without a backbone. So you might think of jellyfish, sea urchin, shrimp, oysters, corals, things like that. And we have over a hundred 3D printers in our building and we see the power of using 3D printing to progress our research and make it accessible to more people. And so

My natural tendency to tinker with things very quickly merged with my biological background. And now I combine the two very, very closely. I called myself a technobiologist. And at the time that I said that word out loud, I don't know, six, eight months ago, I didn't realize that anyone had defined it. But there's actually this really cool paper out of the University of Miami that defines technobiology.

And in reading it, I'm like, wow, this is so cool that someone has defined this. And it's what I do. It's what I do. combine technology and biology very closely. Sort of the opposite of that is if you switch the two words is biotechnology. And I don't remember what the, what the distinction is at the moment, but like, I'm not a biotechnologist. I am a technobiologist.

Hemdeep (10:59)
There is a term for the skill set that you bring to team. That's amazing. So now if you were to compare your approach to solutions compared to other members of your team, how is it that it really differs? Like where do you find your solution or your inspiration to finding a solution or challenges as opposed to other members of the team?

Jack (11:24)
I'm in charge of the industrial scale portion of our facility, but we also see really important need to focus on the consumer side of 3D printers. Laboratories around the world asking someone to buy a $10,000, $20,000, $100,000 printer. That's tough, right? But if we can create

hardware that advances biology on a three, $400 consumer printer that you can buy off Amazon or even Walmart or any store that have technology like that. That's a lot of power. so my focus on industrial, the industrial side, we do rapid prototyping on that side. And so that's where I sort of think of things is how do I move through a bunch of iterations of a device as quickly as possible. And then there's other people in our group that

are more focused on what we call open hardware, which is a piece of hardware that you can distribute as a digital file. And there are some freedoms that come with that open hardware, right? The freedom to use it, distribute it, modify it, share it. Sort of like open source software. You may be familiar with like the Linux ecosystem. That's a huge community that has come together to build this open operating system that there, you can customize it to your heart's desire.

and make it exactly what you want to fit your needs. And we see the same power in open hardware.

Hemdeep (12:52)
You're right. Right now, 3D printing has a wide range of scale in terms of the $400 range right up to $100,000. In terms of how you approach solutions, do you find that you need to run from the $100,000 and then try to scale it to a scale that it would be done at the $300, $400 range? There is a significant gradient between what the deliverables are between the $300,000 to $100,000.

Jack (13:20)
Yeah, absolutely. like to say that the power or the limit of 3d printing is your mind because you can do whatever you want with 3d printing. There's some technical limitations, but most people aren't going to run up against them. But absolutely the capabilities of a printer are pretty closely tied with the price that you pay for it. Now for us, we deal with a huge range of biological scale. So let's talk about that first. We think about

whole groups of animals, which is like, you know, things, all the way down to like sperm, which is a single cell, very, very tiny. And there's things that are even smaller than sperm, but we don't worry about that, right? There's like subcellular, like enzymes and DNA things, right? So we're not focused on things that are that small. But for our needs, the scale of most sperm that we work with is within the range that consumer printers are able to achieve.

Now, I don't know, hopefully your audience is familiar with what Cadworks does, but you guys make this really awesome printer that can do microfluidic devices. And traditionally microfluidic devices are created by like soft photolithography that you need a multimillion dollar clean facility, six months of time. And if you decide you want to make a change to your device, you have to go and do that all over again. And Cadworks isn't the only group that makes microfluidic devices.

There's a whole range of microfluidic printers out there as well. But the power of having a microfluidics printer is that you can prototype rapidly. And if you want to make a change to your microfluidics device, like we can pump out 20 different versions of a microfluidics device every single day to look at how different geometries, different sizes, different configurations of the microfluidic infrastructure change how for sperm or

cells interact with what we're doing on the crowd preservation side. That's just super incredible for us. But again, you know, always trying to think how we can get back to consumer scale is super important for us. The last thing I'll make a note of here is the ability to 3D print molds for microfluidic devices. That's moving towards the consumer side, the need of the consumer side that we are interested in.

Because now we don't have to ask laboratories to buy a hundred thousand dollar microfluidic printer, a $30,000 microfluidic printer, but we can print molds and ship them all over the world. And now people can make their microfluidic devices, but we can like rapidly create the molds for people to print on. So it's sort of just a matter of what your needs are in your laboratory, right? Do you need to be the one doing the prototyping of your microfluidic device?

If you're a biologist, you probably don't need that. You just need the mold so you can look at the sperm or look at the cells under your microscope, which I think is, it's awesome that all of these new technological innovations have come online.

Hemdeep (16:30)
Yeah, you're right.

Robin (16:31)
Speaking of devices and cryopreservation and everything, let's talk a bit more about your key research topic, is the germplasm repositories.

Jack (16:42)
Sure. So let's take it out of the marine biology context for a minute to something that's probably a lot more people are familiar with. Humans have been saving seeds for tens of thousands of years. We have corn, people are like, yeah, we can save corn. And the benefit of saving seeds is that you can plant them at an optimal time or place so that they will grow and make, rather than eating all the corn on the cob, if you save a few seeds, now you can make more corn in the future.

seed world or the plant world is much more advanced in time and technology for a variety of reasons in the germplasm repository world. So now let's talk about germplasm repositories in two words. So germplasm traditionally would be defined as any type of material that you can use to make a new organism, which strictly would be eggs and sperm. Now we recognize that germplasm is actually much broader.

category of types of cellular material that you can use to make new animals with. So eggs and sperm, embryos, larvae, cells, individual cells, because there is technology that would allow you to take nucleus out of one cell and put it into another cell. You could make new lines with that or new organisms. And then in some cases, you can even think about whole animals.

There's a variety of different animals that are small enough that we can preserve the whole thing. And there's also some animals that you can break pieces off of that animal and it'll just grow another animal out of it, sort of clonal process. And then the second part of that is repository, which you can just think of as a bank, right? A bank is where you store your money. can, you know, they track it. They know how much and who has it. They know what, maybe what type of money is there.

And so a germplasm repository simply is just a bank of germplasm. It can be frozen. It can be living. It could be a museum sample as well. Although germplasm is sort of preserved samples. So you're not necessarily going to be able to create something new out of that. But it's just a place that you can store your samples. You can track them. You know where they are. You can put samples in. You can take samples out. That's very basically what it is.

Hemdeep (19:02)
Is this a mandate you and your team have, or is this something that has been sort of mandated by a number of universities around the world and each one is sort of adding to it based on the specialty of the program that they have?

Jack (19:17)
So it's our mission to help people build germplasm repositories, help them develop crop reservation technologies for aquatic species. And there is no mandate for us to do this, but we see the need for it. And let's just talk about economic value for a second. The economic value that, let's say, oysters or salmon or trout or your favorite seafood, right? The economic value that that brings in is enormous.

And you would think that we would want to protect those genetic resources, right? We spend a lot of time picking the right oyster that we want to grow because it has disease resistance or it grows the fastest. thing with fish, right? People pick a broodstock of fish that they want to take those genetics and move them forward in life. You would think that we have those all protected, but we don't. We're very, very far behind in the aquatic field, especially compared to plants.

The dairy bull industry is a multi-billion dollar global industry of preserving the genetics of bulls and distributing all over the world. For aquatics, it's just not there. So there's no mandate, but we see it as a very important mission and everything we do is in alignment with that mission. Now, there is a push from outside groups to make it a mandate.

Hemdeep (20:33)
Now.

Jack (20:39)
Right. When you submit a grant to a funding agency, it'd be really nice if that funding agency said, Hey, you're going to be creating novel genetic resources for whatever reason. We're going to give you a million dollars. Right. We want our investment to be protected. So you need to have some sort of plan of how you're going to protect it. Because so many times there's research done on a line or some sort of genetic resources created and

there's no way for somebody in the future to go back and access it. It's not that it's like completely lost, but no one maintains it or protects it in the way that we would a plant or the bulbs, right?

Hemdeep (21:20)
this preservation is being done on a wide range of terrestrial animals or is it now outside of the bull or maybe some other livestock? Is that really where it's relegated to right now and you're sort of taking the mantle for aquatic and then there's possibly a team that is probably going to be doing it for terrestrial animals, so on and so forth?

Jack (21:40)
I don't have as much information to give there, but my guess is that terrestrial is a lot easier because we're terrestrial animals and our knowledge of the terrestrial animals reproductive biology is probably a lot better compared to aquatics because we can't just go watch a fish all the time to learn when it spawns, Whereas we can watch like other terrestrial animals a lot easier.

Robin (22:06)
Is that like lack of observation kind of one of the reasons why the aquatic wildlife, like repositories for aquatic wildlife is so far behind?

Jack (22:17)
I mean, that's probably contributing factors, lack of observation, probably also a lack of knowing when to observe.

Robin (22:25)
just no one bothered to do it.

So when did this kind of research start popping up in that case?

Jack (22:32)
Our center director, Dr. Terrence Tiersch, he started thinking about this a couple of decades ago and he's been pursuing this for a very long time. He's worked with hundreds of aquatic species in the aquaculture industry, wild fisheries, conservation, and more recently, you know, we've been working with some biomedical species, but he's been working with all over the globe. So he's been working for a long time with it and

He's really been a world leader for a very long time in it. And there's other people who've worked in it. It's just putting it all together and seeing it at a global scale and global need. Terry has been very instrumental in that.

Robin (23:16)
Wow, it's amazing to hear about Terry and all the work he's done to advance this research. We're eager to learn more about milestones and classifications, but unfortunately for now, we're going to have to wrap up today's episode of Big Ideas at Microscale.

Hemdeep (23:32)
A huge thank you to Jack Koch for sharing his fascinating insight into crypto-preservation and the importance of germplasm repository for aquatic species.

Robin (23:43)
From his childhood curiosities to his work at the Aquatic, Germ, Plasm, and Genetic Resource Centre, it's clear how his sincere passion for biology and technology has shaped his career. If you enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to join us next week!

Hemdeep (23:58)
Jack will be back to discuss how genetic banks are key to preserving many species by supporting vital breeding and conservation programs. We'll also explore the similarities and dissimilarities between preserving aquatic species and the emerging techniques that could revolutionize the field.

Robin (24:14)
Thanks for tuning in to Big Ideas of Microscale. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to follow us and stay up to date. You can listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch the full video on YouTube. You can also follow us for more updates and behind the scenes content on LinkedIn, Instagram, Blue Sky, and X. We're Cadworx3D across the board. That's spelled C-A-D-W-O-R-K-S-3D.

show notes, paper references, and bonus resources on today's topic, visit our website, catworks3d.com. That's spelled C-A-D-W-O-R-K-S 3D dot com.

Hemdeep (24:58)
Thank you for tuning in and as always, stay curious, keep exploring and never stop asking the big questions that are shaping our world. Whether you're in a lab or on the go or just curious about the future of technology, join us as we continue to dive into big ideas at Microscale.