Always Available For Collaborations

I enjoy working with people and helping see their vision through. I'm a jack-of-trades able to combine molecular biology experimental design with programming/data analysis, repairing or building needed instruments, and innovating new setups when required. I have experience with 3D printing and modeling and enjoy designing/printing affordable lab equipment. If you have projects or ideas you would like to collaborate on feel free to get in contact. Some examples of projects and skills follow:

Coding an app to automatically measure cell capsule and body sizes from stained microscopy slides (featured below) with a GUI approachable by colleagues with no coding experience.
Designing and 3D printing several pieces of custom laboratory equipment including miniature microscopes with motorized stages (~$100), a compact growth curve reader for 12 well plates (~$200), orbital shakers (~$60), as well as smaller pieces: dish holders for microscopy, sensor stands for spectroscopy, grids to isolate agar after pouring into 96 individual small wells for drug testing, etc.
Coding an app to automatically count fungal colonies grown on agar plates for transformations and survival assays. Currently working on growth defect analysis.
Web design. I have absolutely no training or background in it but am good enough at googling Stack Overflow threads to design sites like this one and the Baltimore Fungal Biology Cener. Happy to help labs and individuals put up websites for themselves.
Repairing over $20K in laboratory equipment and computers. I swear, I'm a useful guy to have around.

Recent Publications

Estimates of actual and potential lives saved in the United States from the use of COVID-19 convalescent plasma

Dragotakes Q, et. al.
PNAS 2024. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.241495712

The Size of Fields in Biomedical Sciences

Dragotakes Q, Casadevall A
mSystems (2023). DOI: 10.1128/msystems.00652-23

Bet-hedging antimicrobial strategies in macrophage phagosome acidification drive the dynamics of Cryptococcus neoformans intracellular escape mechanisms

Dragotakes Q, Jacobs E, Sanchez Ramirez L, Yoon O, Perez-Stable C, Eden H, Pagnotta J, Vij R, Bergman A, D'Alessio F, Casadevall A
PLOS Pathogens (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1010697

Dragotcytosis: elucidation of the mechanism for Cryptococcus neoformans macrophage-to-macrophage transfer

Dragotakes Q, Stouffer K, Fu MS, Sella Y, Youn C, Yoon O, Leon-Rodriguez C, Freij J, Bergman A, Casadevall A.
Journal of Clinical Investigations (2020). DOI: 10.1172/JCI133938

Macrophages use a bet-hedging strategy for antimicrobial activity in phagolysosomal acidification

Dragotakes Q, Fu MS, Casadevall A.
The Journal of Immunology (2019). DOI: 10.4049/jimmunol.1801118

Automated Measurement of Cryptococcal Species Polysaccharide Capsule and Cell Body

Dragotakes Q, Casadevall A.
The Journal of Visualized Experiments (2018). DOI: 10.3791/56957

Bio

I received my B.S. Biochemistry from Ithaca College in 2014 during which I worked in the organic synthesis lab of Scott Ulrich, PhD studying bacterial quorum sensing generating and assaying potential small molecular inhibitors of the V. fischeri quorum sensing system. I also worked with Te Wen-Lo, PhD using CRISPR/Cas to study gene compensation in C. briggsae.

I worked as a Research Assistant in the Greengard Lab at The Rockefeller University from 2014-2016 studying late onset familial Alzheimer's Disease. Using RNAseq and collaborating with multiple human genome research groups we identified a gene potentially involved in AD pathology. I cloned the gene and many isoforms/cleavage products into vectors to analyze in transfected cell culture as well as raising and maintaining KO mouse colonies and generating knockdown mice via lentiviral vector brain injection.

In 2016 I matriculated to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Molecular Microbiology and Immunology PhD program. I joined the laboratory of Arturo Casadevall and began researching host-pathogen interactions between C. neoformans and macrophages. I was involved in many areas of research, but my thesis specifically focused on establishing a macorphage phagolysosome acidification betting strategy, elucidating the mechanism of yeast transfer between macrophages, and working to link the two by showing cellular stress as a trigger for the transfer process.

During my PhD I also became involved with MelaTech LLC. As Chief Scientific Officer from 2019-2022 I oversaw R&D through Phase I of a government STTR grant and were awarded a Phase II contract. Additionally, I developed a sample embedding system allowing us to send several melanin samples to the ISS on missions MISSE-12 and MISSE-13. Finally, I generated a few patents for practical uses of melanin biocomposites, most notably developing a 3D printable melanin composite filament.

I defended my thesis at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown and decided to stay in the Casadevall Lab for a Post-Doctoral Fellowship, allowing me to efficiently continue my research into fungal host-pathogen interactions with the following foci:

How do macrophages deal with unknown ingested threats?
Further characterizing the mechanism and process of Dragotcytosis
How does an environmental fungus become and excel as a human pathogen?

Other Projects

GPT-2 Science Bot

Using the GPT-2 architecture I trained a bot on ~10k open access PubMed research articles. The current iteration is a bot capable of generating a paper (title, abstract, intro, methods, results, discussion) and tweets the resulting paper. The git repo and twitter account are public.

Categorizing Articles as Nature/Science/Cell or not Based on Title Alone

Using a bag of words model I trained a bot to guess whether research articles were from NSC or not based only on the title. Surprisingly the categorizer has an accuracy from mid-70% to low-80%.

Hope Scrolling

An infinite scroll page of different collored boxes. All the fun of scrolling through infinite content without any of the negativity of real social media.

Quigly Dragotakes, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral researcher in the Casadevall Lab

qdragot@jh.edu