In this easy-to-listen-to episode we talk with Ray Ketchum from Agrinos and learn about how he and his team are using microbial consortia to produce products that improve plant health and crop yields. The conversation covers how dPCR helps them quantify individual species within a complex mixture of more than 20 bacteria, which are a mix of aerobes and anaerobes. Ray also shares his career path journey and some insightful lessons learned along the way.
Microbial consortia are groups of diverse microorganisms that have the ability to act together in a community. Such consortia are common in nature and are known to play important roles in many ecosystems but are not always well understood. Soil management and nutrient mobilization are one area where complex communities of microbes are known to be important, whether it be a naturally occurring consortium, or a man-made consortium.
In this episode of Absolute Gene-ius Jordan and Cassie talk with Dr. Ray Ketchum form Agrinos about the microbial consortia he and his team cultivate and produce to improve plan health and increase crop yields. We learn about the challenges of fermenting mixtures of more than 20 diverse microorganisms to reproducibly make products that improve plant health and mobilize nutrients in a completely organic way. As you might expect, digital PCR plays in important role in Ray’s R&D and quality control process. Here, they use dPCR to titer each of the species within their consortia for quality and regulatory purposes, a task that cannot be done by cell culture methods given the range of bacteria involved.
Cassie’s career corner gets Ray sharing his full career development story from undergraduate, through grad school and postdoc positions, and into his professional career. Ray is generous in sharing his early misconceptions about miscalculations while providing advice to help other avoid similar missteps.
Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guest, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System.
Jordan Ruggieri00:00
Episode Five. Can't even believe it. Plant a seed and just give it some sun and water and hope it grows. Wasn't meant to be a pun but it kind of is.
Welcome to Absolute Gene-ius, a new podcast series from Thermo Fisher Scientific. I'm Jordan Ruggeri.
Cassie McCreary00:27
And I'm Cassie McCreary. And for today's episode, we're thrilled to speak with Dr. Ray Ketchum about his work.
Jordan Ruggieri00:33
Ray is the group leader for manufacturing sciences and technologies at a Agrinos, a company focused on modern agriculture sustainability. He holds a PhD in botany and boasts over 30 years’ experience working in plant science. He also gives some great career advice on the episode today that I found extremely useful. We hope you enjoy our conversation.
Cassie McCreary00:54
101 plant puns. I beg your garden… t hat one's mine.
Jordan Ruggieri00:59
All right, I'm gonna say, have you bot-any plants lately, Cassie?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 01:02
What we do here is we produce microbial consortia to use in agriculture. So these are basically microbiomes that we manufacture, we sell to growers, and those are applied to the field. What I do is, I lead the group that does much of the, at this point it's the research and development, as well as the technical production for the bacteria that we grow and also for doing the analysis of those bacteria. My group kind of coordinates, the quality control tests that our quality manager and our quality technicians actually use.
Jordan Ruggieri01:51
That's awesome. What does, so you're talking about consortia. Can you elaborate a little bit on what that actually what that means and how that's important?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 02:00
So Agrinos manufactures three main agricultural products at this time, we have others that are in development, but those are our commercial products. One of them is a microbial consortium, which contains 22 different bacteria. These are all soil bacteria, they're nothing genetically modified, all of our products are organic certified, and OMRI certified. So, these are just naturally occurring soil bacterium that we've taken, we've grown them up separately, at least to isolate them, but then as we manufacture them, we group them together. And so we grew up this large fermentation, which contains a collection of anaerobes in one fermentation and aerobes in another fermentation. And we blend those together. And these are all bacteria, which are intended to improve plant health, mostly by increasing the availability of nutrients in the soil. Some of the bacteria actually fix nitrogen, some of them helped to solubilize inorganic nutrients that are in the soil, like phosphorus or certain types of inorganic potassium, and make those available to the plant. So, all these bacteria have been isolated, essentially buy from the rhizosphere, which is the part of the earth that surround the roots of the of each individual plant. You know, if you pull up a plant, and you've got that big bundle of dirt, there are a lot of bacteria that are in that soil that are very closely associated with the roots and there's sort of this beneficial interaction between those bacteria in the plants. The plants actually provide the bacteria with certain nutrients and in exchange, the bacteria also help to solubilize some of the materials were actually produce nitrogen that gets absorbed by the root. And so there's this interaction. And we're trying to exploit that by making up these, these groups of bacteria that you can actually add to the soil. So consortium refers to just that large collection of bacteria in a single sample or a single product. Now, I mentioned also that there are two other products that we manufacture. So, we've kind of taken this and we've gone one more step. And what we've done is we have a production facility in Mexico, that uses these same bacteria to help break down shrimp bio waste in Sonora, Mexico, along the Gulf, or the Sea of California, the Sea of Cortez. There's a lot of shrimp farming that's done down there. And you know, after the shrimp are deveined and the shells are removed, and they're basically cleaned up, there's all this waste material that's leftover. So we take that waste material, and we ferment that with these same bacteria. And from that we produce two additional products. One is a bio stimulant product, which is the liquid that's left over from that fermentation. And the other is all the solids that are leftover are dried and milled down, and that's our third product. So we've been trying to be this green company where we're helping to reduce waste by actually using that waste in different ways and applying that to agriculture. And it's actually worked quite well.
Jordan Ruggieri05:23
Question. Question about the shrimp. I'd love to I'd love to talk about that. How did you even find out that the, that shrimp waste can be something that's impactful for plants and for the soil?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 05:36
Shrimp, and almost any other type of shellfish or that type of waste, you know, if they contain protein, they contain a source of nitrogen. And nitrogen tends to be the nutrient that plants need the most they can't make it themselves. It's returned to the atmosphere fairly readily. So any source of nitrogen is usually a good thing. The other thing that, that shrimp and also other types of shellfish have, crustaceans in general have chitin in their exoskeletons. And that chitin can also serve as another source of kind of a more slowly degrading nitrogen, as long as you have bacteria that are in the soil that are able to break that down. They can break down that, that chitin into to nitrogen as well, some other carbohydrates. And again, those are all very beneficial for plants.
Jordan Ruggieri06:29
So it was looking at the at the, you know, the chitin in the material that the shellfish have and seeing how you could apply that into the consortia, and what you offer to try and get more nitrogen into the plants is kind of how that stemmed is, is that a correct assumption?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 06:48
Right? I mean, that's basically the end product works that way. So that the solids that are leftover, that's the material that contains the chitin. The other interesting thing is, when you actually do this process, you separate the solids and the liquids. The liquid portion of this gets, the lipids actually get removed from that. And the lipid, or the material that's leftover is this liquid portion that's, in many cases, kind of what's left over from the bacteria, when they're actually using this as a food source. So it's some of the metabolic products that the bacteria produce, enriched in this liquid. What's fascinating about that particular liquid is it has it’s kind of like a stress relief mechanism. It's a way of helping plants to recover from certain types of stress, like water deficit, or in some cases herbicide or pesticide drift or anything like that. It seems to be very effective in in terms of relieving stress.
Jordan Ruggieri07:52
It's like a seafood broth for when you're sick. A nice broth to calm the throat, it does the same thing for the plants?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 07:59
Exactly. Instead of a chicken broth. It's more like a shrimp broth.
Cassie McCreary08:03
Some might call it "shrimply amazing." I'll see myself out. You two have fun. Bye now.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 08:11
They might call it that. Yes.
Cassie McCreary08:14
I'll see you next time on Absolute Gene-ius. Yeah. Carry on.
Jordan Ruggieri08:19
So talk a little bit about the R&D behind some of these products. Do you look at you know, individual strains or species of bacteria and kind of try to figure out how they might interact as a consortium and if it's worthwhile to add them in? Or how does that R&D kind of function?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 08:43
We'd have a large consortium of, or a large collection I should say, of bacteria that have been collected through the years from a lot of these field sites and things that are, you know, sort of in our stores or in our master cell bank. And that gives us a large library to go back to and pick out certain types of function. A lot of the bacteria had been screened for metabolic functions and characterizations. That's one of the things that the R&D group and my group does. We screened different bacteria for different abilities, in terms of breaking down waste, or chitin, for instance nitrogen fixation, solubilization. But then we also will take individual strains, we will DNA sequence them. So those are some of the types of activities that we do. But probably the main thing that my group does and spends most of their time on is just figuring out how to grow these bacteria together. What's a little bit unusual about our company compared to other companies is a lot of companies will put a bacterial product together that may have four or five bacteria in it, in which case they've grown each of those individual bacteria separately. One of the things that we found, and it kind of applies to this bio stimulant product that I was telling you about, this liquid portion, is that there is a benefit to growing all of the bacteria together. Um, there seems to be communication between certain bacterial strains, kind of almost interaction between those strains. And if you think of kind of some of those ecosystem studies that you might have done in biology, where, you know, you had a fish tank, and you threw some duckweed in there, maybe some algae, and you threw some fertilizer in there, and then you just kept taking samples throughout the year and you saw how that thing changed over time. That's kind of what you see with some of these bacteria, as well as the whole population will change at certain times during the fermentation. And we want to get to a point where things are pretty much stabilized, we know the numbers of certain types of bacteria within there. And we know that it's going to be an effective product once it's applied to the field.
Cassie McCreary11:00
Interesting. So you're seeing a benefit to growing them all together. So there's not like some kind of like competition, in a sense, between the bacteria, or?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 11:08
There is. And again, that's it, there absolutely is. And that's where the real fun starts, is figuring out how do you get these things to grow together so that they'll all come up, you know, they'll all reach a certain titer, a certain population within that product. There's competition in, you know if you don't do it right, there will be certain bacteria which will completely dominate and mess up the whole culture. That's sort of the proprietary work that we have in terms of figuring out how do we get them all to grow together? And how do we get them all to get up to that particular titer? That's where the magic happens.
Jordan Ruggieri11:42
That's very cool. Now, I would assume as you kind of scale from R&D to more, you know, production level for a product, there is some difficulties that arise in the scale up. Is there a way that you need to QC or QA as you kind of scale up the product and, you know, make sure that you're seeing the same kind of breakdown of bacteria?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 12:07
That is one of the main challenges, is making sure that we're hitting a certain titer. For our main product, we have a specification on our label, which we have to have to meet just from a regulatory standpoint, QC is very much involved in that with us. The other thing that we need to do, too, is depending on if it's a new product, we need to figure out, once we're able to grow things together, “Well, what is that titer that we can reliably hit?” So there's a lot of work done on saying, you know, “If we adjust this parameter, can we get everybody up here? Or, you know, do we have to settle with everybody down here or what?” So to get those, those titers, you know, if we're working with individual bacteria, it's super easy to do, just play them out. But if you have a collection of bacteria, that's where things get a little bit more complicated. And that's where the digital PCR comes in.
Jordan Ruggieri13:00
How does digital PCR as a as a technology play a role in that in that process?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 13:04
We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing without digital PCR. The reason for that is because we have a product that has 22 different bacteria together. It's impossible to plate these bacteria and count them, you know, all at once. Some bacteria don't play very well. Some of them are anaerobes, some of them are aerobes, so they can't grow under the same conditions. So all of these variables make digital PCR really a keystone to the technology to our quality control. So, what we do is we do a whole genome sequence for each of our bacteria. We figure out within that genome, which genes are single copy, and which ones are unique to that particular species. And then we design primers and probes for that portion of that particular gene. Or, in some cases, it's just a DNA sequence it may not actually be a coding gene. And then once we have that, we can take a very complex mixture of bacteria, do have total DNA extract on that and then analyze that. Again, with the assumption being that every signal that we get on digital PCR relates back to one single bacteria. And by that we can actually get some pretty good, pretty good numbers.
Jordan Ruggieri14:21
Make sense? Do you run into any inhibition problems as well, when it comes to bacteria or some of the samples? PCR inhibitors or any type of inhibitors that might impact say, real time PCR versus digital PCR?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 14:36
I would say that, you know, at this point, we haven't actually done the real time PCR versus the digital PCR comparison to see if there's a difference there. I don't suspect that there is, simply because of the way the DNA is extracted, most of those inhibitors should be removed. But there is another issue that we have run into recently. And I think it's something that the industry as a whole is starting to notice a little bit more. And that is that, you know, when you take this complex collection of bacteria, and you're doing a consortium on them, whether it's from a gut, human gut microbiome, the soil microbiome or whatever, there has been this assumption that your DNA extraction is extracting the DNA from all of the bacteria equally well. And that's simply not the case. In our case, what we found is that a lot of our bacteria are spore forming. And if they've formed spores, we just have a heck of a time really getting the DNA out, representative of what's actually in the in the product. It turns out that we've been way under counting what our product actually has. So those are some of the issues that we've run into. And we're working on those. We don't have a solution to those yet. We're really not sure exactly how much of an impact this is going to have. We started working with some of those 22 species. But we haven't done all 22 species yet. So we're, you know, this is something that we're working on right now.
Jordan Ruggieri16:08
How does this product impact the customer? Is there an impact on food production, per se, for farmers?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 16:16
So what our product does is it improves the yield in the field. We've seen individual studies where depending on the crop, it could be up to a 30% increase. That's really unusual. More frequently, it's in the, you know, the 5 to 15% range. But what the product does is, as I mentioned, it does fix nitrogen. So it adds additional nitrogen to the soil. It solubilizes any sort of inorganic nutrients that may be in the soil already. Some of the bacteria helped to break down, residual field waste, you know, a lot of the straw leftover from, you know, and canes that are left over from the harvest. They help to break that down. So there's a lot of benefits that way. As I mentioned, also, the other two products. One is a stress relief product. That's our B Sure is what it's called. iNvigorate is the consortium that we're talking about. And Uplift is the chitin containing product as well. So all of those, yes, increase in crop yield. And mostly it's for agricultural crops. Okay, some of the B Sure's been used very successfully in turf.
Jordan Ruggieri17:30
So, any studies into potential impacts on say climate change?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 17:37
We haven't done any studies specifically about these bacteria. Certainly, one of the things that they will provide is additional nutrients to the plants without additional artificial inputs. So chemical fertilizers. So at least in that regard, you know, that 5% increase in yield is coming not at the expense of using additional petrochemical-based products and gas and diesel that's used in the field. But just from the bacteria themselves. But we haven't really looked at any sort of carbon sequestration issues with the with the products yet.
Jordan Ruggieri18:16
But maybe some potential, like chemical runoff or things like that? Interesting. Okay.
Cassie McCreary18:25
Taking a quick break from our conversation to tell you about Applied Biosystems™ QuantStudio™ Absolute Q™ dPCR system. This instrument enables quantification of your targets without the need for standard curves in only 90 minutes. Digital PCR can be as simple as preparing your samples, loading onto the plate, and running the instrument.
Jordan Ruggieri18:45
Unlike other digital PCR systems, the Absolute Q dPCR instrument does not use emulsion or other droplet-based methods to compartmentalize reactions. In fact, the microfluidic array plate (MAP) technology enables consistent delivery of more than 20,000 micro-chambers.
Cassie McCreary19:02
And Thermo Fisher Scientific has a suite of dPCR assays for applications like AAV viral titer quantification, liquid biopsy analysis, and wastewater surveillance. You can learn more at www.thermofisher.com/absoluteq or visit the Absolute Gene-ius webpage. Again, that's www.thermofisher.com/absoluteq or visit the Absolute Gene-ius webpage.
Jordan Ruggieri19:29
The Applied Biosystems™ QuantStudio™ Absolute Q™ dPCR system is for Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures. Let's get back to our conversation.
Cassie McCreary19:43
I would be very excited to welcome Ray to Cassie's Career Corner. Step into my office.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 19:50
You've got the alliteration down, so you have do that.
Cassie McCreary19:52
How lucky was that? Thanks Mom and Dad for naming me Cassandra the way you did. Jordan you can come in too. Come on in. Here we go everybody we're all here in the Career Corner. This is the part of the podcast where we talk about obviously your career, maybe some fun stories, and, you know, things along those lines. So we're gonna run the gamut here a little bit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your educational background, you have your undergraduate work was biochemistry and botany. And then your PhD was plant biology and botany. Do I have that correct?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 20:25
Correct. Yes. My undergraduate background was at Connecticut College, a small liberal arts college. And that's where I first got introduced by Professor Scott Warren, who is a good friend still. He introduced me to working with plant cell cultures as part of the plant physiology lab class. And I ended up actually taking over to the cultures that he had been keeping going just as part of a work study project. And that was, I don't know, there's just something about, you know, keeping plant cells going sort of indefinitely in sterile conditions that just fascinated me. And, and so that's kind of where I got involved in the whole sterile technique thing. At the time, I was working on plant salt tolerance in plant cell cultures. And the reason for that is because Scott had actually started these salt marsh grass plant cell cultures that were resistant to sodium chloride that you added to the medium. And that also really fascinated me. So I kept working on those. And eventually, we got a paper out of it. That was something that got me involved in in graduate school, I wanted to continue working on salt stress tolerance in plants and salt stress mechanisms. You know, I've been working on those plant cell cultures all this time. And that's kind of the work that I was doing with my when, like, graduate work.
Cassie McCreary21:55
Very cool.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 21:56
And all of that, especially the stuff that was working with the suspension cultures. And so that was the other things, almost everything I worked with were these liquid cultures. So it wasn't necessarily just callus on agar, I was doing a lot of work with plants, cells, and liquid culture. And that's sort of intrigued the USDA, because they were working on plant cell cultures of Taxus, Taxus brevifolia, which was the Pacific yew, and looking at it for as a source, you know, in cell culture of the anti-cancer drug Taxol. Which at that time, was being harvested in forests, you know, for the bark, and for that anti-cancer drug. And some of the people I work with, Donna Gibson, and the work of it was first started by Alice Christen, was looking at using plant cell cultures as an alternative source of supplying that particular anti-cancer drug since the trees themselves are small, they're kind of scraggly looking, they take forever to grow. They're very slow growing. They are I've been out in the forest. I'm in the Northwest right now. And I've been out in the forest, and I found them out there. And they're just not attractive trees most of the time.
Jordan Ruggieri23:17
That's still made amazing research to be a part.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 23:20
It was, yeah, it was really fortunate being able to kind of participate with that. And that has pretty much been most of my career. Working with USDA to get those cell cultures going for them to do research on,for all of us to do research on. As a visiting professor at Cornell, Cornell University, continuing work with that. And then as a postdoc, and eventually a research professor in Rod Croteau's lab at Washington State University, because he was the one who was doing most of the molecular biology of this pathway in the plant. And it was just a really nice collaboration for me, because, you know, I had these plant cell cultures that were producing this, this anti-cancer drug and, you know, he had this basically this stable of graduates and postdocs who were doing a lot of molecular biology to try and pick out all of those genes in that pathway. And this was a really nice source that they could use to do that. And I was very fortunate in being able to, you know, kind of hone my molecular biology skills in that lab as well while I was working with them.
Jordan Ruggieri24:33
It's an amazing way to visualize a group of students. A “stable” of students
Cassie McCreary24:38
That's right.
Jordan Ruggieri24:39
There was a lot. We had, there were over 30 people in the lab at one point, so it was it was quite an operation.
Cassie McCreary24:46
And you've shifted since well, kind of, from the from the plant cell culture to now this sort of the soil microbial focus and everything so what was that like? Like making that kind of that change? And then what was sort of the drive there for you?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 24:59
Well, um, yeah, it's sort of a continuing story, right? All of these things are connected. It's all about the networking. The cell cultures that I started while it was at Cornell University were used by a graduate student colleague of mine who was at Cornell after I'd already left. And so I left Cornell and gone to Washington State and he was working in Professor Mike Schuler's lab at Cornell in the chemical engineering department. It was actually working with his plant cell cultures that I had developed. So we knew of each other kind of through Don Gibson, my former USDA boss, but we hadn't really met each other. Anyway, Harry ended up somehow coming back to Portland, and working with a company that was also doing some of the work with these plant cell cultures, these Taxus yew plant cell cultures. So he knew of my work that way. And we had this small company, biotech company called Diana Plant Sciences in Portland. And one of the things that we did is we actually produced essentially what we call cosmeceuticals. So, these were, essentially just freeze-dried plant cells that were very high in antioxidant content and those were incorporated into French cosmetics. This was sort of my first exposure to actually growing plant cell cultures in larger fermenters. So that was my work with Harry. Harry eventually left Diana Plant Sciences and then joined Agrinos. And at that time, Agrinos was building this large fermentation site where I am sitting right now in Clackamas Oregon, which is just outside of Portland. And Harry eventually called me and said, "Hey, I need somebody to, to run the manufacturing science and technology group to help go from R&D to scale up these bacterial cultures into these larger fermenters." Which is essentially what I was doing at Diana Plant Sciences, where we're going from, you know, plant cell cultures on plates to smaller shaped flasks, to 250-liter fermenters. So that's how, like the long, long story as to how we went from plant cell cultures into microbes.
Cassie McCreary27:14
Oh I love that. That's great. And I think you hit on, without even me prompting you, so well done you. Snaps to Ray. You hit, and I think something really important, and I think it's an important piece of actually career advice, is it's all about the networking. And I think that a lot of people would find that that's a pretty important thing when it comes to the trajectory that their career will take. Do you have other pieces of advice? Like if you could go back and tell yourself when you were a graduate student, or to somebody who is brand new and just entering, you know, either the industry or even academia? What's a piece of advice you might give?
Ray Ketchum, PhD 27:53
Yeah, I mean, the networking thing, it's funny, because I always sort of poo pooed it, and just said, “You know, it's really not about the networking, it's about your abilities, and you know, what you do” and, which is nonsense. That's sort of the old Ray coming back and telling young Ray “Don’t be such an arrogant jerk." It's funny, because I had a colleague, when I was with USDA, who mentioned the fact that he'd never gotten a job that he applied for. Or he never applied for a job, yet he was completely, you know, fully employed and at that time was, you know, a researcher with USDA. And, you know, for him, it was just like you said, it was or like we've discussed, it's all it was all about networking is about, you know, somebody knowing somebody who had a job opening up who recommended you for that. And, to some extent, almost every job that I've had has been exactly that way. For 30 years, it's really been connections. So you really can't, I don't think, undersell that, or you certainly shouldn't underestimate the value of that. As far as career advice goes, and just kind of being arrogant. When I was applying for grad schools, I was applying to programs. You know, I'd read papers by a lot of these different researchers, and found a couple of positions or couple of labs that I really wanted to work in. And so I wrote directly to those, the professors, you know, in those labs. I made my decision based on whoever was going to pay me the biggest stipend, which actually, I'm probably not the only person who's done that.
Cassie McCreary29:32
Sincerely doubt it.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 29:35
But where the arrogance came in, is I said, you know, I didn't want a teaching assistantship. I wanted somebody who was going to give me a research assistantship, because research was the thing that was really interesting to me. And so I ended up going to Colorado State, only to find out that after I'd been there for, you know, on my research assistantship that expired after like two years, and then I had to go for teaching. You know, I had to get a teaching assistantship, and I had to do the teaching anyway. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it; I had a great time teaching. And if I'd known it was going to be that much fun, I probably would have done that initially. That's one piece of advice is to listen to the people around you, especially your professors. don't assume that you know more than they do. Because you don't. And if they say, you know, “This is a good idea, you should actually go there,” and really listen to that advice. It's good advice.
Cassie McCreary30:24
I wouldn't consider myself super crazy far along in my career. But even I would look back and say, "Well, you know, I might do this different, or I might do that different." And I think it's really easy at any point in your career to kind of pause and take a second and say, "Well, if I had done that, what would it look like today, maybe" or something like that, too. And so I think it's just kind of it's interesting from your perspective now and seeing how, and then ultimately, something that you were very much not interested in, you really ended up enjoying at the end.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 30:50
So you bring up an interesting point that I didn't touch on. So, you know, I said that my undergraduate was at Connecticut College, where I double majored in botany and biochemistry. I didn't start there. I started at Cornell. I started at Cornell in mechanical engineering, and it was a disaster. I hated it. They weren't very fond of me either. So you know, when I finally left, I swore I would never go back there. I was just, I just had such bad feelings about the place. And so when I applied for my first postdoc at USDA with the Taxol project, Donna Gibson was at the Southern Regional Research Center, which was in New Orleans. And I interviewed down in New Orleans with her, she offered me the job. And just like, before I was getting ready to pack up and move down there. She called me the week before and said, "Ray, my husband just took a job up in Sayre Pennsylvania, and I'm going to be working at the federal nutrition lab at Cornell. Do you still want to do you still want the job?" And I just hung up, I said, "I swore I would never go back there." You know, and so I ended up back at Cornell and that actually, that experience was much better than the original experiences as an undergrad. Mechanical engineering was not going to be for me and in I swore I'd never go back to Cornell but both of those things, well, not both of those things. But the going back to Cornell definitely did happen. So,
Cassie McCreary32:32
Yeah, we'll just consider the mechanical engineering years just like a wash. It's fine.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 32:38
Exactly. It was.
Cassie McCreary32:39
Yeah. I started down the path of, I was interested in being a forensic toxicologist. And then I started down that path. And I was like, "Well, I hate this." So now, I'm a digital marketing manager. So go figure.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 32:54
So speaking of small worlds. When Diana Plant Sciences closed, they were actually Diana, the Diana group was bought by a chemical company called Symrise. And they closed us in Portland. And so there was a year there, where I was between jobs. And I became the scientific director of a forensic toxicology lab. And that was all of the analytical experience I had as a postdoc, which was, you know, the gas chromatography, HPLC, LC mass spec, GC mass spec, all of this analytical experience I picked up at Washington State University was just, oh, yeah. Now let's, let's analyze urine. So.
Cassie McCreary33:46
That's exactly right.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 33:49
And that's exactly what you got out of it. Right?
Cassie McCreary33:52
You're not wrong. So, wow, what a what a weird set of connections.
Ray Ketchum, PhD 33:59
Well, if you get to be as old as I am, you're gonna connect with probably, you know, somebody at some point. It's just inevitable. There aren't that many other people.
Cassie McCreary34:07
Ahh. So funny.
That was Ray Ketchum, group leader at a Agrinos in Portland, Oregon. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of Absolute Gene-ius. Stay curious, and we'll see you next time.
If I try any more plant puns, I might “soil” myself.
Jordan Ruggieri34:29
That's a good tie back to "Feces Happens."
Cassie McCreary34:32
We love a theme.