Sandy Volrath

I first met Sandy in 2001 when I joined Cropsolution, and I worked with her at three different companies over the years. Early on in our “relationship” it became clear that we had differing views on many topics. However, we never clashed over sports (primarily because Sandy didn’t care about football and I didn’t care about basketball), and we were able to bond over our shared general skepticism, particularly towards touchy-feely things. As others have noted, Sandy was one of the most technically proficient molecular biologists I have ever known. One quick example that came to my mind was a project where we wanted to express recombinant human ACC1 and ACC2. At the time, the only reported expression of these enzymes came from a big name academic lab but they ignored our requests for their clones. And since this was in the early days of gene synthesis, it was prohibitively expensive to get them by that route. So Sandy set out to make them by PCR’ing them from a liver cDNA library. But each ACC cDNA is over 7 Kb and all the resulting clones had high error rates. So she ended up assembling full length cDNAs from error-free fragments of the PCR clones. What was most impressive about this was how rapidly she delivered the error-free full length clones. And this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for her – it was her standard operating procedure. She was an asset on any team and I will miss her.