Colt Knight: 00:20

You can always repeat your speech if you think it’s worthy. No.

Megan Joynt: 00:23

It’s okay.

Colt Knight: 00:29

Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, I have got some drop in guests. They happen to be roaming the hallways and and saw the the glowing lights of the the neon studio and said, hey. What are you doing?

Colt Knight: 00:53

And introduced themselves. And we have Mark Nilan, the animal care facility manager, and his student lab assistant, Megan Joynt. Folks, welcome to the podcast.

Mark Nilan: 01:06

Hello. Hello. Thanks for having us.

Megan Joynt: 01:08

Thank you.

Colt Knight: 01:09

And so Mark and Megan have a really cool job. They work with, some some aquaculture type stuff. And we thought it would be really cool if they could come in and and maybe give us an update of what’s going on in their world and all the exciting research that’s happening in the world of the, animal care facility.

Mark Nilan: 01:31

Sure. Just to get started, I guess I’ll just give a background on what we do and what we work with is human disease and toxicology. And we use a model organism for that and it’s a zebrafish. We also have a mouse facility too, but everyone’s fascinated about why do you use zebrafish? They’re not like humans at all.

Mark Nilan: 01:51

However, they have a vertebrate just like us. So usually in tours, I always ask kids like, you know, what is the same? And they’ll finally get around to it. Like what do we have in common with fish or chickens and vertebrates? And so that gives it opportunity so that we can study diseases, human diseases using those as infecting those with either the disease or changing in the genetics of them so we can manipulate them so that we can study treatments or how the disease works.

Colt Knight: 02:23

And I would imagine that their turnaround time is a lot quicker than using, mammal models.

Mark Nilan: 02:29

Exactly. Good point. Because with just the ease too, the fish are so easy to spawn and you get a lot of eggs out of each one. These are your common zebrafish too, you’d see in the pet store. But other than we don’t go to the pet store and get them, we get them from University of Oregon.

Mark Nilan: 02:47

They designed this inbred zebrafish called AB in the eighties. And so what that does is allow us to have a clean slate on this fish. It has no surprises. We know the genetics of it. So if we go to Boston, you see an AB fish, it’s technically just like ours, so we can all transfer.

Mark Nilan: 03:06

So yes, within mice, you have to do surgery to get the embryo out. Fish, produce outside. So, and you get and the egg, the embryo is completely transparent, so you can watch early development. And then you can manipulate by injection through that chorion and inject genes or doing a lot of CRISPR lines, which is like they cut out the genome and it goes back to like see what it’s coding for.

Colt Knight: 03:35

And the Zebrafish Lab is actually just right across the alley from my lab where we do grazing behavior and artificial insemination and different things. But I’ve always been fascinated by the Zebrafish Lab because back in the fifties, it was the meat cutting lab for the university back when we still had the a meats program here at the University of Maine. And the the rail where the carcass is hung is still sticking out of the door. And I’ve always been jealous. I’ve always wanted I’ve always wanted that room back so I can I can do more meat cutting stuff?

Colt Knight: 04:11

But but you’re actually getting a new facility, right?

Mark Nilan: 04:15

We are. Just across the hall, they took over a regular lab to give us more space. They have a lot of lines that they use, so we use up space quickly because that’s one thing. They spawn pretty good so that you can have lots of strains of fish, and they’re all in these little tanks. So it’s efficient, but, you know, just need more room and better climate control.

Mark Nilan: 04:39

With the real problem with our lab that we have now is really never meant for that type of growing. It was just a wet lab. We needed more, let’s say, temperature control. These fish need 28 degrees C and they need a light cycle fourteen ten, 14 light, and that’s when they do the best. The temperature controls really needs

Colt Knight: 05:04

Yeah, this building was built in the nineteen thirties. There there’s no climate control here. They they turn the steam pipes on in the winter, and then you just pray they turn them off

Mark Nilan: 05:13

Yeah. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 05:14

When it starts getting warmer. Because without the windows and everything open, it gets 100 something degrees in some of these rooms and we’re going state

Mark Nilan: 05:22

of the art. We’re putting a lot of money in this one. So we’ll have its own stuff, its own climate control, and all the things we want to get the best out of the fish so that the researchers can get better results and not have to mess around with it.

Colt Knight: 05:38

Yeah. And I wanna talk to you about some of the the the neat projects that you have going on. But I’m curious, how did you get into the world of zebrafish?

Mark Nilan: 05:48

Yeah, it is a weird I wonder that too, because it wasn’t a trajectory I was on. But I’m originally from Nebraska, so I grew up with a farming background. My mother’s side are all farmers in Iowa. And so as a kid, I worked on the farm for the summer. And I always liked that, working with production animals and always had that in my back of my mind.

Mark Nilan: 06:12

But I went off to college and got into banking and things like that and kinda got burned out on that. And then my wife got a position out here in Maine and I decided to explore. And I went to University of Maine and saw what programs they had, and they had this aquaculture program. And I thought, well, that checks a lot of boxes off. It’s farming, but it’s also a different species of fish, which I’ve always been into as a child.

Mark Nilan: 06:37

So the rest, once I got in the program, is history because once you find what you want to do and you find the people that know how to get you places, you’re right into it.

Colt Knight: 06:46

It’s amazing how your your life takes divergent paths from where you grow up and your educational background and everything. You know, I’m from West Virginia originally, and I went to graduate school out west. Mhmm. And I was a range animal nutritionist. And somehow, I ended up in Maine, which has no range at all.

Colt Knight: 07:06

You know? And and, you know, I had a primarily, a beef cattle background. And here in Maine, I mostly work with pigs and chickens and beef cattle occasionally, sometimes sheep, goats, llamas, emus. Just depends on whatever folks have questions on. But it’s, it’s definitely not what I thought I would be doing when I went to graduate school.

Mark Nilan: 07:29

Yeah, me either. I was gonna be a fish farmer. I’d worked on the fish farm that the university owns down on Taunton Bay called CCARB. And that’s really what I really love. Once I had a tour of that from a class, that was really what started it.

Mark Nilan: 07:44

I was kind of exploring this, but I took one class in vertebrate biology and we took a tour down there. And when I had the tour after that tour, was like, that’s what I wanted to do. And then I jumped really into who was doing this and the rest was history, but I did not think I was gonna end up in a zebrafish lab. We’re not eating those fish by any means. So it was kind of a but switching it’s still a fish farm.

Mark Nilan: 08:09

It works the same way. I have to raise these fish so they’re excellent quality, not to be eaten, but to be studied on. So they still have the feeding and the husbandry and the mechanics and the system and the maintenance. All the stuff I love on any fish farm is right there in that room.

Colt Knight: 08:26

That’s very unique. Megan.

Megan Joynt: 08:29

Yes.

Colt Knight: 08:29

How did you end up at the University of Maine? And then how did you end up working in the fish lab?

Megan Joynt: 08:35

Well, I’m originally from Delaware, and I knew I wanted to do marine science. So I when I was applying to schools, I looked up did so much research on like the best programs and Maine kept coming up as one of the best marine science programs. So I applied and I around sophomore year, I took intro to aquaculture and I loved it and I realized I wanted to have my concentration in that. And for one of our assignments, we had to tour the zebrafish facility. And I was looking for a job and I wanted to do something that, like, got me into my field of study.

Megan Joynt: 09:16

And I just asked Mark. I was like, so are you guys hiring? Or he was like, I guess so. Yeah. And I’ve been working there ever since.

Megan Joynt: 09:27

I’m a senior now. I did my capstone with the zebrafish, and it’s great. I’ve learned a lot. I learned a lot about how to take care of the system. Actually, this year, we had to replace the our UV, sterilizer.

Megan Joynt: 09:45

So that was cool. I got to see how the UV worked and was taken apart, and that was pretty awesome. So I’ve learned a lot.

Colt Knight: 09:56

When I was a kid, I remember when folks asked us what we wanted to do, you know, when we grow up. There was a lot of those Discovery Channel shows that were kicking off about about all the the dolphins and the shark biologists and everything. And folks were really wanting to become marine biologists. And at that time, there weren’t a lot of programs for that. And there’s really not a lot of jobs for marine biologists that just wanna study dolphins or sharks.

Colt Knight: 10:27

Yeah. Those are those are pretty coveted positions, I would think.

Megan Joynt: 10:32

Oh, yeah. People in those positions are normally there for life. Mhmm. So it’s yeah.

Colt Knight: 10:38

And, you know, speaking of that, this is kinda really off topic, but I used to watch, the alien shows on the History Channel and stuff. Mhmm. Just don’t know where where we segued into that. But You would always see these folks on there, you know, talking about these crazy alien theories, and they’d have, like, a PhD and postdocs from MIT. And, you know, they had more letters behind their name than than, you know, an entire alphabet.

Megan Joynt: 11:03

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 11:03

And then as I got older and went to graduate school and got into academia, you realize that when you have, like, a theoretical physics PhD, there’s only, like, one professor on each campus that is the theoretical physicist. Right?

Megan Joynt: 11:19

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 11:19

And so it’s kinda like astronauts. They just keep going to school until the job comes open at NASA.

Mark Nilan: 11:27

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 11:27

And and so a lot of those those physicists got into the alien world because they could use their degree to make some money.

Mark Nilan: 11:36

Yeah, and they’re always curious too. That’s the thing about professors, just being in this world, because I came from non academia, just the private world of banking and working hospitals and the factory and all those jobs. And this is the first time I experienced not being a student but working here opens up a whole another world. It’s a little ecosystem of its own and you have all these people that are interested in everything. So you can jump into any, you know, thing you want, any group you want to talk to, and you’ll have an expert in it.

Colt Knight: 12:07

We’ve had this discussion on previous podcasts, you know, as students, you come to a university, not really knowing the broad scope of things that happen here and the different paths you can take. And it’s always amazing hearing different people’s experience on how their education has, you know, sent their trajectory in a different path.

Mark Nilan: 12:30

Well, that’s what college, when I talk to, when I work with students, probably had 30 or 40. I’ve been doing the lab since ‘three. So in that many years, you know, I hire on just like Megan every year and I hope to get a junior and have to have them for two years. And usually they’re over that point where they kind of know what they’re doing, but sometimes I’ve had earlier students and they will be kind of not knowing what they’re doing. It had this trajectory of like, I’m gonna be this.

Mark Nilan: 12:59

And they’re really upset that it isn’t, but those first two years are critical because that’s why they have you take those humanity courses. That’s why you get that universal

Colt Knight: 13:09

education is why we’re called

Mark Nilan: 13:10

the And there’s nothing wrong that. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that because that’s your exploratory time. Then you get to say, Well, I came here for this, but this is better. My wife’s a good example. She was going be an anthropologist.

Mark Nilan: 13:21

She turned out to be a speech pathologist. So she’s not shattered or nothing, know, but it ended up working out well. She’s had a long career with that job, but started out as anthropology.

Colt Knight: 13:31

Dave Yeah. So it’s always and one of the things that I enjoy working with students and I have graduate students and I teach class here on campus and I hire students to help with projects on occasion. But it’s it’s frustrating and sad sometimes because sometimes it it takes so much training to get them to where they actually can can do something useful for your lab. And then by the time you have them trained, then they’re gonna graduate or or go on to a different program and then you get really sad, then you hope they stay for graduate school or or something so you can keep them on for as long as possible.

Mark Nilan: 14:08

That is true. Yeah. That is definitely true.

Colt Knight: 14:10

When you find a good student, you you don’t wanna let them go at all.

Mark Nilan: 14:14

That is true. But

Colt Knight: 14:16

let’s transition back into the Zebra fish. And maybe you could highlight some of the different research projects that are going on at the moment.

Mark Nilan: 14:27

Well, the Zebrafish Lab is through the CORE Department, and what that does for the university CORE is run through the VPR office, and they have these satellite places like the Zebrafish or the Small Animal Facility, or there’s many others, but researchers use those on the side to do their research. So they work with us to rent space or use the animals that we sell them eggs and embryos for their research. What we have for professors now are a professor doing candida fungus infections. And what that is, is a fungal disease in a regular immune strong person would not be a problem, but in an immune compromised person, say someone going through cancer treatment, it can cause death. So what he has been exploring for many years now is how to make a treatment for that so that that person would not succumb to something so little as a candidate of fungus infection.

Mark Nilan: 15:32

So they use the fish for that. So what they do is they’ll take out some of the immunity. They have innate immunity and, what’s the other one, innate immunity or whatever, and they’ll cut that out, and so that then they can treat the fish with that and see what it does, and then find how much it can survive or whatever. We have another professor doing multiple sclerosis, muscle dystrophy. The fish, in fish, the muscle works the same as in humans, so they can treat them and they can have, if they have full blown MS, we’ve had fish for that, they don’t survive because they can’t eat.

Mark Nilan: 16:10

Fish has to swim, so there’ll be a lot of heterozygous fish and they’ll work with that, where they do crosses and things like that. We have another professor doing flu flu virus. So, a professor that worked here before that started the lab many years ago, she was a virus professor, and so we did cystic fibrosis too on them. And who else do we have? I don’t think you have anything else I’m missing, Megan?

Megan Joynt: 16:46

No. I think you covered the big three.

Mark Nilan: 16:50

Yeah. The big ones and then there’s offsides that we’ve done over the years.

Megan Joynt: 16:55

Yeah. That’s pretty much the projects we deal with. I mean, this year, Mark let me do my capstone on zebrafish. So I really looked at the fecundity of the fish as they age. And

Colt Knight: 17:13

And what does that mean for the folks that aren’t aren’t used to those terms?

Megan Joynt: 17:16

So fecundity is like their spawning rate or how?

Mark Nilan: 17:21

Well, it’d be like in any animal, as you’re younger, that’s the time to produce offspring. And as any animal ages, it depletes as it goes down as you age us, whether it’s in humans that are having babies at 60 or 80 years old, the chances are less. It’s nature’s way of controlling.

Megan Joynt: 17:40

Yeah. Fecundity is just their spawning rate. And we looked at eight month olds, a year old, and two years old. And two year olds are technically, geriatric.

Colt Knight: 17:52

That would be analogous to an older person.

Megan Joynt: 17:55

Yes. Yes. Because they’re past like, typically, the best age to spawn is a year old. Correct?

Mark Nilan: 18:02

Yeah, their best size, they give them alts. Eggs, you can The other turnaround too, as you’re saying, like in mice is what, twenty one day gestation period. And then the mouse is, how many? A year old or less. In the fish, you can get them to spawn, go from egg to egg in less than three months.

Mark Nilan: 18:23

And that’s where the new system comes in. With our older system, with the temperature changing and not the conditions perfect all the time, that kind of gets longer. But with a new system, and with the proper feeding and everything perfect, you can have a fish producing eggs at two months, which helps the research out a lot.

Megan Joynt: 18:43

Oh, yeah.

Colt Knight: 18:44

Yeah, and I love hearing about all the new facilities that are coming to campus. Just this morning, I was at the JF Witter Center and we were moving the dairy cows from the old dairy barn to the brand new dairy barn with a robot milker for the first time this morning. And I had all my cameras set up and we were recording that. And then you stopped by and you were talking about your new facility. And Extension has got a, a new food innovation center that’s coming on to campus.

Colt Knight: 19:13

And I know we’ve got three or four buildings that are coming down campus to make way for new facilities. And I don’t know what all they are, but The Sawick Building?

Mark Nilan: 19:21

Have you heard of that?

Colt Knight: 19:22

Mm-mm.

Mark Nilan: 19:23

No. I’m not sure that’s gonna be researched. It’s more with outside, I think they do. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to say anything because I don’t know, but that is another building.

Mark Nilan: 19:34

I don’t want to imply something, but yeah, I’m not sure what all that entails.

Colt Knight: 19:37

Last year we got our new engineering building up and running.

Megan Joynt: 19:41

Exciting stuff.

Colt Knight: 19:43

Yeah. We got the new hotel on campus.

Megan Joynt: 19:45

I know.

Mark Nilan: 19:45

That’s true.

Megan Joynt: 19:46

It’s very bougie.

Colt Knight: 19:49

I haven’t had the opportunity to book anyone into that hotel yet, but, I’m hoping to do so here.

Mark Nilan: 19:55

Yeah. Yeah. If you have a podcaster from outside of the state, right? You can bring them in.

Colt Knight: 20:00

I usually try to invite, folks that I’m friendly with. Yeah. So they can stay at my house and then I don’t have to pay for the hotel for their visit.

Mark Nilan: 20:09

Well, I’m just saying once you become like a mainstream podcaster, then you’ll have all the

Colt Knight: 20:14

Yeah, our 3,000 downloads are really Hey.

Megan Joynt: 20:18

You got two new ones.

Mark Nilan: 20:21

That’s how probably they all started, you know?

Colt Knight: 20:24

Yeah, it takes a while, but we’re growing steadily on the podcast. We’re pretty happy about that.

Mark Nilan: 20:28

Well, people are interested in this stuff and I do a lot of tours. That’s what another benefit of the zebrafish as a model. A lot of people probably are listening have heard of Jackson Lab. Jackson Lab, I believe had some zebrafish at one time, but they’ve always used ours if they need or kind of work with us because they’re just specialized in mice. But you can’t visit Jackson Lab.

Mark Nilan: 20:49

You can’t see what they’re doing. And the zebrafish are unique because our biosecurity really for fish is a foot bath and a hand wash. There’s not really much you’re gonna transfer to them in the water unless you just happen to be playing with fish that are diseased and run-in there and do it. So it’s pretty good on biosecurity where the mouse was silly, then now you have to take a shower, you know, gown up because you could transfer things. So we can bring people in.

Mark Nilan: 21:15

We’ve had tons of tours with kids from schools or anybody in

Colt Knight: 21:19

You just telling me before we started about the FFA kids that came in.

Mark Nilan: 21:23

Yeah, FFA kids come and they, and of course the thing is what gets people is the lab is 28 degrees, it’s like 84 degrees, sometimes warmer and sometimes humid. So it keeps the tours a little short sometimes because it is an acclimation thing working in that lab. But I get a lot of friends wintertime though.

Megan Joynt: 21:43

Oh yeah.

Mark Nilan: 21:45

Nice They’ll and show up nice with that. They’ll warm up. But, but yeah, they, but what it does when you do, when you have a tour is people come in and they can see animal research right there, because what you see on the news and see the horrible things that may happen, or you just whatever’s in your mind about what we’re doing with these animals. Are we cutting them up? Are we doing all this?

Mark Nilan: 22:06

Is there any regulations? No, we have a lot of regulations. We have a committee called IACUC, Institutional Use Care and Animal Committee. I think I probably got that wrong.

Colt Knight: 22:17

Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Mark Nilan: 22:19

I used to have that down. I just say IACUC.

Colt Knight: 22:21

And just for folks that are that are listening, on that committee, there is a licensed veterinarian.

Mark Nilan: 22:27

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 22:28

And then it’s made up of a group of people that are non animal researchers. Plus, you’ll have some animal researchers on there, but we also got people from English department Yeah. History. They’re there to get the outside advocacy and the outside, experience so that they can ask questions and make sure that all animals are treated humanely.

Mark Nilan: 22:54

And

Colt Knight: 22:56

so it’s actually a big ordeal And to use animals as an experimental

Mark Nilan: 23:02

lately I’ve seen people from Orno, they grab someone from just the community. It’s usually two professors we have, at least for this facility. You can’t do your own lab. It’s two other ones. They’ll come in with a check sheet every six months and look at the tanks and look at everything and doing it.

Mark Nilan: 23:20

We have guidelines that we have through the federal government.

Colt Knight: 23:23

Yeah, we basically have to submit an application. And you have to do all the written research to make sure it’s not been done before. Then you have to justify using animals. I mean, if there’s a non animal model that you can use, you have to use

Mark Nilan: 23:42

that And the numbers too, yeah. I started this and iACUC wasn’t, I haven’t got to come. I don’t believe iACUC was around in ‘three as much. I don’t remember half

Colt Knight: 23:51

of It’s more of a big deal now than

Mark Nilan: 23:53

it was. It is. It was kind of more hands on. I think it was around, and you could do more experiments. I mean, I used to do upward bound.

Mark Nilan: 24:02

The kids would come in and we’d pick an experiment to do for their short season and it’d be something off the wall, like one was like, We’re gonna do antifreeze runoff. We wanna see what that does to cautic animals. We were, I don’t know if we even had to write up a protocol for that, but now you would, and you’d have to justify, like you say. And what comes up, a lot of people think they’re probably using too many animals because you just want to like, Okay, I just need a thousand fish What to do iCook has told me is that a lot of times they use too few animals to be statistically justified. Because once you throw statistics in there, if you don’t get the values based on what you do, you’ve just used a lot of animals that you’ve killed or used for no reason, and your statistics are bad if you’ve done too many or too few.

Mark Nilan: 24:55

So that was an eye opener. So they have that on track now. So there’s nothing that goes to the lab that isn’t done through a protocol, through the group of IACUC, it’s strictly checked.

Colt Knight: 25:06

Yeah, do random inspections, they’re always

Megan Joynt: 25:09

Oh yeah.

Mark Nilan: 25:10

Yeah. So we don’t have, when people come in, what’s really, and then with the fish lab, is unique because people with furry animals, of course, when we do our small animal facility that is not too herbal and is just kind of off to the side, people, we really can’t show them, but that really got, but with the fish, I noticed, at first people were not too concerned about fish. We kind of have more of a disconnect. So they were okay. But lately in the last five years or more, when I get to reserve, I’m more conscious of what are we actually doing with these.

Mark Nilan: 25:42

And I can easily show And what’s the nice thing, I am very transparent, nothing secret. I mean, I show them, they see the fish, how we treat them and what we do, and they can look up the, on the cards on the door what we’re actually using them for.

Colt Knight: 25:57

I’ve had this conversation with the news media Oh. Recently with livestock farms.

Mark Nilan: 26:02

Oh, bet.

Colt Knight: 26:02

Because I think the general public thinks a lot of, like, your swine and chicken facilities are closed off to the public because they’re trying to hide something, animal welfare or abuse issues. And the reality is, is they’re closed off for biosecurity issues, is to prevent the spread of disease either coming in or going out. And, some farms, I believe it’s the Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana now, now has got public viewing areas through their large scale farms. You can actually see what’s happening there. They’re behind glass.

Colt Knight: 26:40

They’ve actually created barns with corridors that you can walk above the animals and view stuff just to just so people know that we’re not actually hiding things from you. Mhmm. Because if you abuse animals, then they don’t produce and then it’s not profitable. And so there’s really no excuse for abusing animals because it’s not a problem.

Mark Nilan: 27:03

That’s true. It’s just people having their head from all the I’ve seen the pictures, I’ve seen the videos because it does happen. We can’t be naive. It does, it’s very small because exactly, I grew up in a farming family. This last thing my grandfather wanted is to hurt the animals because Yeah, they they didn’t want didn’t money.

Mark Nilan: 27:17

This is a prophet. So it’s the same thing and it’s good to be transparent. It’s just nice going back to our model because there’s not really anything that we have to worry about crossing. We were open during COVID. We had to shut down our small facility, small animal facility, but fish, they don’t, they can get those diseases too, but we’re not a vector to them usually that we’re going to transfer over.

Colt Knight: 27:42

That’s handy.

Mark Nilan: 27:43

So yeah, that is, and it does help a lot for getting that out and showing that, Hey, this is a science project. We’re following the rules.

Colt Knight: 27:52

So what do you think the future of your new facility will be?

Mark Nilan: 27:57

Well, the future is ongoing research from those, professors and then hoping upping it. I mean, upping it with bringing in more people. That’s what it’s about, right? You can show you have a facility that’s top notch, people start paying attention and then we can do, you know, who’s the model for the zebrafish model is used for all other kinds of things. I just briefly mentioned some of the professors doing the things they do here, but if you go out to the world like Dana Farber, Mass General, all those, and every college probably now has a facility.

Mark Nilan: 28:35

There’s in genetics, Dana Farber specialized in leukemia, child leukemia. They’ve been using zebrafish forever. So they’re a great model for the aging down in Mount Desert Island, MDIBL, that, I don’t want to say it’s university, but it’s more of a think tank, Mount Desert Biological Laboratory. They have a big zebrafish lab size of ours, and they’ve been doing it for years and they bring in people to do research. They’re doing aging and regeneration.

Mark Nilan: 29:08

The model, the fish they discovered after using it a long time is that it can regenerate a lot of its parts of its body, like the heart. You can cut the heart and it will grow back. We can’t do that. So think of a heart disease, number one killer. So they’re working on it and they’ve had a lot of progress with that from early days.

Mark Nilan: 29:27

Also aging too, they can regenerate so many parts that if that’s really what aging is about, isn’t it? Where you just kind of get worn out and if you can fix your liver, it or whatever, you can prolong your life. So there’s so many other things that they use. So that would probably be the future. If you have a new lab, you’d draw in more research.

Colt Knight: 29:50

Yeah, and having facilities gives researchers the opportunity to apply for more grants. Exactly. Scott There’s a little bit of inside baseball. But as a researcher, you know, we have to apply for grants to pay for our research. The university doesn’t just give us money to do research.

Colt Knight: 30:08

It used to be that way a long time ago.

Mark Nilan: 30:12

Did it? I didn’t even know that.

Colt Knight: 30:13

It was a long time ago. Kind of you just got so much per year to do whatever. Boy, those were the big. Yeah. So those guys got to do a lot of really fun stuff that no one would fund in the modern times, but they got to do a lot.

Mark Nilan: 30:26

Well, just hear about the money they take out of the grants. It up to 50% now, 48% or 47%?

Colt Knight: 30:32

And so nowadays, when we apply for a grant, it’s to do the research. And it can pay for a lot of things. But federal grants do not pay for infrastructure.

Megan Joynt: 30:44

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 30:44

So if you do not have the facilities to do the research you would like to do, then you’re not going to get the funding to pay for the infrastructure to do the research. And so that’s why some universities and institutions get more funding for certain for certain types of research just because they already have the facilities. So with you being able to expand to these new modern facilities, the researchers are gonna have way more opportunities to bring in the grant money. The grant money is usually split almost in half. One half of it goes towards your research, and then the other half goes to, we call it indirect costs.

Mark Nilan: 31:23

Indirects. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 31:24

That’s That goes straight to the university. And that’s what pays for electricity, the facilities, maintenance Yeah. Salaries, that kind of thing.

Mark Nilan: 31:34

Yep. And, yeah, you know, once the money rolls in, everything starts moving. So you can pay people, you can hire people, you

Colt Knight: 31:40

can And it snowballs, right? So, you know, as the lab grows, you can have more graduate students, you can have more classes, the university gets bigger. So it’s really, really a good thing.

Mark Nilan: 31:50

Yeah. People just not as good that you do this podcast now because it gives people, an inside information on what we’re doing here because we aren’t hiding anything. Had, it was a funny thing. The person, the PR person here, I don’t remember her name a long time ago called down because they were gonna bring someone into the lab. They called down a lot.

Mark Nilan: 32:08

I don’t know who it was. There’s politicians been there. We’ve had actually Governor Baldacci getting eggs out of the tank, you know, for a Photoshop there. So, but they’ll call down and she called down one time and said, Hey, I’m bringing this person by. Is there anything you have that’s secret?

Mark Nilan: 32:24

Would you just don’t show them that? Know? I said, I don’t have anything secret. It’s a public university. You guys own it.

Mark Nilan: 32:29

She goes, Okay, well, if you do, just don’t show them that. Go, Okay, I’m on it. But no, is, of course there are, I don’t want say secret, the labs have grants or a project they’re working on, that they’re working on these projects, they’re going to put a paper up. That’s as secret as we get. They don’t want to be scooped.

Mark Nilan: 32:49

I’ve heard of that one time where the lab was so sad and I was like, What is wrong with you guys? We got scooped.

Colt Knight: 32:53

You know, that happened to me.

Megan Joynt: 32:54

Do you really?

Colt Knight: 32:55

Yeah, my PhD dissertation.

Megan Joynt: 32:59

Oh my gosh.

Colt Knight: 33:00

I’m not going to mention the research.

Megan Joynt: 33:02

Okay. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 33:03

But they totally botched it. And then a year later, they had to come back to me and ask for technical advice.

Mark Nilan: 33:08

Well, gives you some hey, at least you got that out. Felt pretty Yeah. Good

Megan Joynt: 33:12

about that. You should.

Mark Nilan: 33:14

But yeah, that was something when I heard it. And so no, they are very adamant about keeping what they’re doing kind of so they can write this paper and get it out. That’s the game they play. And everyone asks on tours too, they’ll say, What does you mean figured out with the zebrafish? What have you cured or what have you done with all these diseases?

Mark Nilan: 33:31

I mean, well, nothing. We haven’t cured but mold we get a little piece of it each time they do something.

Colt Knight: 33:36

Yeah, get little

Mark Nilan: 33:37

bit more. Just a stack of cards, just keep going and they pass it on to someone else, They do it and over all these years, it’s been twenty five years, I’m over twenty five years. You surely discovered something. And now we have discovered something, but it’s just a little part of it. It’s so complex.

Mark Nilan: 33:52

Treatments are getting better. Treatments, like

Colt Knight: 33:54

I said, the candidate life is getting

Mark Nilan: 33:56

Candidated Fungus, I think they put something out for that. But for multiple sclerosis, you know, you hear in the news, you know, that’s still people get it. We haven’t heard it. But you just got to remember how complex and how evolving these things are. They replicate.

Mark Nilan: 34:09

And so you could maybe get so far.

Colt Knight: 34:12

Discoveries in biological science happen slowly

Mark Nilan: 34:15

over generations. Frustrating.

Colt Knight: 34:18

And it’s not like on TV when it’s just this eureka moment with a guy in a lab coat mixing beakers together. Right? No.

Megan Joynt: 34:25

It’s It’s like a little piece of the puzzle that you just add to

Mark Nilan: 34:28

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 34:28

One person is working on how one molecule moves from here to there. And then then then when they figure that out, then the next generation of students can figure out how it goes from there to there.

Mark Nilan: 34:38

And then it stops going from there to there is what I hear. Because I was told as a child, we’re gonna have, we won’t have the common cold anymore. Well, we’re not even close on that. Like all our viruses.

Colt Knight: 34:49

The cold’s fighting back on that one. It didn’t stay the same.

Mark Nilan: 34:52

Yeah, It’s a bald and there’s

Colt Knight: 34:53

a reason

Mark Nilan: 34:54

for it. Some things we’re tapping into, know, there’s a reason for the virus, you can go into that. That’d be a whole nother podcast, but that’s really interesting. Yeah, they get that piece and then it’s sometimes so frustrating. They think they got something, they’re on a track and then nature just goes, Well, I’m gonna change that because I’m evolving into this.

Mark Nilan: 35:10

So it’s an ongoing thing. And we really haven’t really cured a lot of things when you think about it.

Colt Knight: 35:15

Well, it’s a moving target.

Mark Nilan: 35:17

It is. Yes guess that’s how you say it. So with this generation thing, I think that’s something that people are lost, or regeneration, I should say, where if you can, like the zebrafish does, you cut the heart, it grows back. That’s something we can’t do, or can we do? Our genes, because we, you know, our genes shut off over evolution, we haven’t used them, so we just kind of knocked them out, or can we insert them back in?

Mark Nilan: 35:38

So I think that’s a big push, and since it’s in this model, I’ve kind of got to learn how, you know, that’s something that our future is maybe growing a heart or having a gene put in, and if we have heart disease, they’d cut it out, or now you’ve had heart disease and you cut it out where your heart’s doomed, it’s half percent. No, now it will grow back.

Colt Knight: 35:56

Yeah, and then we’re doing some work with pigs right now.

Mark Nilan: 35:58

Oh, yeah,

Colt Knight: 35:59

okay. Genetically modified pigs. Okay. And it’s only for research. There’s nothing approved for anything as of yet.

Colt Knight: 36:07

We’re trying to either grow replacement parts, like a new heart valve.

Mark Nilan: 36:14

I know a friend that actually a person that has a heart valve and there was two choices, right? You can do the mechanical or the pig. And you probably know this, but I think the pig, it doesn’t, what is it? It accepts it. The body accepts But what is it that the pig one works better oh, less recovery works better, but shorter life.

Mark Nilan: 36:35

Is that right? Okay.

Colt Knight: 36:36

And and pigs are, like, 80 something percent similar Yeah. To us. They’re they’re not they’re the closest that we have, but they’re still not close enough where it’s a direct replacement.

Mark Nilan: 36:46

Yeah.

Megan Joynt: 36:46

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 36:47

And I went to a really neat, genetics lab that worked with pigs in in I think it was either Indiana or Iowa. Mhmm. And they were explaining how, there are certain certain ways that that pig anatomy works versus the humans. And it’s some of the things on pigs are on the outside where it’s on the inside on people, and it’s it’s hard to get them to mesh together. But with these genetically modified pigs, we can maybe insert some human genes into them and make it to where they will bridge those gaps in the future.

Colt Knight: 37:22

So,

Mark Nilan: 37:23

yeah, that’s another topic too. People that scares them to death too, because all my relatives are making corn and corn has been genetically modified for a long time. Yeah. It’s the only way to grow it because you would not get the amount of bushels you’re not gonna feed. And with ethanol, there’s a lot to that, you know?

Mark Nilan: 37:40

So I’ve heard about GMO for a long time.

Colt Knight: 37:45

Well, you’re salmon.

Mark Nilan: 37:47

Oh, yeah, of course. I worked with salmon too, being a fish farmer with degree I have. I worked with salmon, cod and halibut.

Colt Knight: 37:55

Are salmon, genetically modified salmon approved now through the FDA?

Mark Nilan: 38:01

Well, that’s that’s a, was a word.

Colt Knight: 38:02

I know they were working on it, but I don’t know if that ever went

Mark Nilan: 38:04

Well, through or I think it’s more the anthoxanthin and canthaxanthin is the chemicals, chemicals they say, that they put in the fish to cause the color. Whereas the natural salmon eats like krill and things like that and takes on the fleshy color. That was a big debate when I was in school here twenty years ago. That was a big contention and they had to get over that because they had to stamp it with a chemical, a genetic homophyte. It’s really not because for farm raised, you feed the pellet, which has regular anthisan, which is a chemical, a natural chemical in the pellet.

Mark Nilan: 38:39

So they turn to pink flesh, because they did plenty of studies where they put down a fillet of naan. You know what the meat looks like if it’s not have that? It’s gray. No one will eat a gray salmon.

Colt Knight: 38:50

No. It tastes exactly

Mark Nilan: 38:52

the same. So then they did, they’ll say, We have to make the pink stuff. We’re done, but we have to put that chemical thing on even if was farm raised. So that was a big debate and it’s still, well, and then there was a taste thing, because you are what you eat. So there’s so many people saying, Hey, this tastes different.

Mark Nilan: 39:07

Well, of course it’s going to taste a little different because natural is going to eat all the different fishy And you’re going to eat a pellet, which is fish meal, and then some corn and some other stuff in it. So they’re going to add a little flavor. So I think still people have that, but now it’s about price. I’m a lot throws that in there, but

Megan Joynt: 39:24

In case anyone’s wondering, the pellets that they feed the salmon do not taste good.

Mark Nilan: 39:30

Well, like dog food never tastes good.

Megan Joynt: 39:31

It is very bad and very dry.Mark Nilan: 39:34

Yeah. Well, the fish don’t care because they’re very wet.

Megan Joynt: 39:36

No. The fish don’t care. People

Mark Nilan: 39:38

Yeah. Got Well, don’t eat it, Megan.

Megan Joynt: 39:40

I tried it on a

Colt Knight: 39:40

I got to go raid a a fish, food lab when they closed at the University of Arizona when I was graduating student and got to grab some of their Wiley mills and different things that we could use on our our livestock feed mill side of things. And I was always amazed. They had this one Wiley mill. So our our normal Wiley mills, all they do is they take, like, corn or hay and then they they just pulverize it into a powder. Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 40:08

And you can sift it through different mesh sizes to get different different granularity there. And I was like, oh, they’ve got a Wiley mill for this fish meal lab.

Mark Nilan: 40:18

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 40:18

And it was for squid. And on the inside, it wasn’t knives. It was like these little fingers and stuff that pulled apart the the squid. Yeah.

Mark Nilan: 40:29

Hogs would eat anything. So you feed them fish food, they wouldn’t care.

Colt Knight: 40:34

Alright. Well, it was good to have you with And us, Mark and we learned a lot about the fish lab here on campus and all the projects that are going on. Is there anything else that you’d like to tell the listeners?

Mark Nilan: 40:51

I don’t know. We’re open for business. If you are always interested in this field, contact the university and see what we have here. People of Maine own this place, so don’t be afraid to stop by.

Megan Joynt: 41:03

Aquaculture is really fun. Highly recommend it. It’s awesome. It’s really good to look and do.

Colt Knight: 41:11

Yeah. But with that, we appreciate having you on the Maine Farmcast. And like always, if you have questions, comments, concerns, or suggested episodes, you can email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.

Megan Joynt: 41:32

Yay.

Mark Nilan: 41:35

No.

Megan Joynt: 41:35

Didn’t know if it was still recording. I was like,

Mark Nilan: 41:38

Was that good or

Colt Knight: 41:40

Yeah.

Mark Nilan: 41:41

Was the first time I ever did a podcast.

Megan Joynt: 41:42

Me too.