Firefly photography

15 Jul 2018 on Blog, Art

A personal list of firefly photographers and photographs

I’m very lucky that there are dedicated photographers who take beautiful photos and videos of wild fireflies. I’ve also tried it myself, with less beautiful results, so I really appreciate the technical and artistic skill that goes into these photos. Here is a non-exhaustive of photographers who I’ve seen some great firefly media from:

Radim Schrieber: http://www.radimphoto.com ; https://www.facebook.com/RadimPhoto/
Ken Nagie: https://www.facebook.com/Ken.Nagie
Spencer Black: https://www.blackvisual.com
Alex Wild: https://www.alexanderwild.com

Please consider supporting their work by purchasing some artwork if you see a photo that you like!

One of Radim’s pictures is actually the sidebar on this website. Thank you Radim!

Here is a great Photinus pyralis (Big Dipper firefly) timelapse from Ken Nagie: Photinus pyralis timelapse

About

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Moore Lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Diego. I joined the Moore Lab in July 2019, and was a self-funded NIH/NIEHS F32 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Moore lab from 2020 through 2023. . I completed my PhD in the Weng Laboratory of the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

My postdoctoral research elucidated the first known causal biosynthetic genes (the “PKZILLAs”) for an algal giant marine polyether toxin - an impactful class of molecules of significant pharmaceutical and toxicological interest.

One of the PKZILLAs also turned out to be larger than titin, the accepted largest known protein: An artistic comparison of PKZILLA-1 and human titin, where PKZILLA-1 is shown at ~25% larger than titin Figure by Tim Fallon, PhD. Stylistic size comparison of PKZILLA-1 and human titin, not to scale, wherein PKZILLA-1 is shown as roughly 25% larger than titin. Abbreviations: megadalton (MDa), acyl carrier protein (ACP), ketosynthase (KS), ketoreductase (KR), dehydratase (DH), enoylreductase (ER), fibronectin (Fn), immunoglobulin (Ig). Titin figure adapted from https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/185 under Creative Commons license, attribution: David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB). ACP structure modeled from bacterial ACP (PDB id: 2FAE). KS, KR, DH, ER, modeled from mammalian fatty acid synthase (PDB id: 2VZ8).

My PhD research focused on characterizing the specialzed metabolism of firefly luciferin, and involved de novo transcriptomic and genomic sequencing and assembly, recombinant and crude enzymology, and LC-MS. I was a founding member of the Photinus pyralis (Big Dipper firefly) genome project, leading to the first linkage group resolution genome of any firefly. I’m interested in comparative genomic approaches to decipher metabolic questions generally.

Key findings of my PhD research include:

Sequencing and assembly of the Photinus pyralis (Big Dipper Firefly) genome, and its comparison to other bioluminescent beetles, leading to the finding that click-beetle and firefly luciferase evolved separately
The discovery of sulfoluciferin and luciferin sulfotransferase, which we now understand are conserved in all fireflies (Lampyridae)

More information

Curriculum vitae (CV): Timothy_R_Fallon_CV_PW-is-Spring2022.pdf (CV password protected with Spring2022 to prevent webcrawler email spam)
ORCID: 0000-0002-3048-7679
Google Scholar publications and citations
LinkedIn - timfallonphd
Mastodon - @photocyte@genomic.social
GitHub - photocyte
GitLab - photocyte

Miscellaneous endevours

In 2017 We launched the datasite for the firefly genome project: http://www.fireflybase.org
In 2016 Crowdfunded the project to sequence the Photinus pyralis genome on the Experiment.com Scientific crowdfunding platform: https://experiment.com/projects/illuminating-the-firefly-genome
In 2014 I took the “How to Make Almost Anything” class at the MIT media lab. You can see my exploits here: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.14/people/tim_fallon/index.html

Collaborators

Wisecaver lab (Purdue) https://www.wisecaverlab.com
Moore Lab (SIO/UCSD) http://scrippsscholars.ucsd.edu/bsmoore
Weng Lab (MIT): https://wenglab.net
Lewis Lab (Tufts): https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/faculty/lewis/
Sarah Lower (Bucknell University): https://thelowerlab.wordpress.com
Bybee lab (BYU): http://bybeelab.byu.edu/Home.aspx
Stanger-Hall lab (UGA): http://research.franklin.uga.edu/stanger-hall/
Oba lab (Chubu University): https://www3.chubu.ac.jp/faculty/oba_yuichi/english_page/
Fireflyers International: https://fireflyersinternational.net/

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