About Me: Hi everyone! This summer I am excited to be a returning RET participant working with the Shell lab again on cellular studies related to Tuberculosis infection. I am currently entering my fifth year of teaching at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School, focusing mainly on teaching Biology and Environmental Science at various levels. I am excited to once again join the RET team to conduct authentic research this summer to better my lab skills, network with other educators and researchers, and bring more interesting examples and concepts back to my district. This program has made a huge influence on the way I approach my lesson planning in STEM, to focus more on problem-solving, inquiry based lessons that are inspired by the Engineering Design Process. Since my previous year, I have enjoyed making many adjustments to our current labs and other activities to promote more skill building and collaboration between my students.

About the Lab: The Shell lab is geared towards understanding how the bacteria that cause tuberculosis (TB), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), are able to survive a variety of microenvironments within the human body during infection. The overall goal is to understand new innovative ways to combat drug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis in order to reduce the negative health effects caused during TB.

To understand how to combat and eliminate bacterial cells that cause TB, we need to understand what makes these cells so tolerant of antibiotics. When a person has been infected with tuberculosis, one type of immune response in the body is to trap foreign Mtb cells within granuloma complexes to kill the cells- exposing them to unideal conditions such as low pH, hypoxia (where there is very little oxygen available) or low nutrients available. However with Mtb, these cells are able to remain in a slow, nongrowing state that does not need to expend as much energy. This allows them to stay alive within the human body until conditions become more favorable, where they can start the infection again. A central goal of the Shell Lab is understanding how these Mtb cells are able to adapt to these stressful conditions by altering their gene expression as a survival mechanism. How these gene regulations and survival mechanisms work in Mtb is still being researched, but may allow future researchers to design better and faster treatment regimes for patients.

Within each main focus, lab members are conducting experiments to isolate and analyze the proteins coded within a non-pathogenic model species, Mycobacterium smegmatis, that may allow the pathogenic mycobacterium species to withstand many modern treatments for tuberculosis (TB). Our protein of focus this summer called Sre, is believed to play a role in stimulating an important cellular complex called RNase E, which may play a role in detecting stress responses and allowing Mtb cells to be more tolerant of drugs (meaning they are not efficiently killed by antibiotics). Sre is a protein that is conserved throughout mycobacteria and close relatives, but its function is not well understood. This summer, a fellow in-service teacher, Em Beeler, and I will focus our project on trying to understand Sre’s functions during cell growth when exposed to various antibiotics.

Project Title: Investigating the Impact of a Novel Protein (Sre) on Antibiotic Tolerance in Mycobacterium smegmatis

Weekly Updates:

• Week 1: This week was our first week starting the RET program, and being able to return back to the WPI campus. The day started with introductions to the program, overviews, and touring of the labs. By the second day, we were granted access into the Shell lab, and started to draft our experiments that Em and I will be working on this summer, called timed-kill assays. These assays will allow us to study how our nonpathogenic, but related species of bacteria called Mycobacteria smegmatis grow with or without our protein of interest (Sre) when exposed to different antibiotic treatments. This lab is similar to my experiment last year, where I performed MICs, or Minimum Inhibitory Concentration tests to initally understand Sre’s role. Many modifications were made to this protein of interest over the year, so I am excited to jump back into a follow up experiment where more has been understood about this protein. I am also excited to renew some of my lab skills gained from last year ans rejoin my lab members. This week we have started to write our experiment and culture our cells of interest, however since our experiment is timed, we will start real trials next week. This week we have focused on deciding which strains of bacteria we want to use, culturing them, and getting them prepped for next week. We have also worked on deciding which types of antibiotics would be the best to test for our assays.
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Final Poster:

Lesson Plan: