As part of an Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant (IISG) funded research project, a Chicago middle school girl has discovered a new compound in goose droppings that has shown activity against cancer. As a result, she will soon be an author on an article submitted for publication in a biomedical research journal.
Camarria Williams was recruited through the Boys & Girls Club of Chicago along with other middle schoolers to take part in an opportunity in a University of Illinois Chicago laboratory to do real science.
“Chicago has a long history of disparities, whether they’re rooted in socioeconomics or race-based policies—this is an opportunity to use high end biomedical science to help bridge some of the documented gaps in STEM participation,” said Brian Murphy, a medicinal chemist in the UIC College of Pharmacy, who leads this program. “By working with local organizations or community centers we can bring citizens into the process of discovering antibiotics.”
Murphy, along with Jin Yi Tan, a UIC graduate student who leads a team of volunteer graduate students and postdoc mentors in the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab, developed this program to engage youth from marginalized neighborhoods in STEM education using a novel approach. The kids are introduced to scientific experiments and participate in a variety of learning opportunities.
At the center of these activities is the assignment for these young scientists to collect samples from their environments to test in the laboratory for possible antibiotic properties, and they are very much involved in making decisions throughout the screening process.
Creating the conditions that made it possible to bring youth into the lab to do this work began a few or more years ago when Murphy set out to make the search for antibiotics in the environment cheaper, better, and more efficient.
With some disease-causing microbes developing resistance to our medicine chest of antibiotics, this work has become especially important.
Murphy and his team adopted technology that would help them develop a leaner, more efficient microbial library that would have fewer redundancies. And they repurposed older technology to allow them to very rapidly screen for antibiotic activity.
“When I joined the lab,” said Tan, “I worked to integrate these different innovative methods into one pipeline to make the process much more efficient, as well as add high throughput robotics to automate many of the steps.”
UIC graduate student Jin Yi Tan leads a team of volunteer graduate students and postdoc mentors in the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab. She developed this Sea Grant project to engage youth from marginalized neighborhoods in STEM education.
Automating the process has also made the process simple enough that Tan, who was funded as an IISG Grad Student Scholar to build on Murphy’s project, could teach middle school students how to do it.
The team has worked closely with the James R. Jordan Boys & Girls Club in the near west side of Chicago as well as the Bartlett J. McCartin Boys & Girls Club in the Bridgeport neighborhood to recruit youth to take part in the program.
Over the span of several years, 22 have volunteered for this opportunity—three groups of 5−7 middle school-aged Boys & Girls Club members and a small group of high school students.
The youth who joined the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab chose places and objects to sample for bacteria in their environment—they sampled lake water, insects, and flowers, but also swabbed different kinds of surfaces such as a playground slide and an air conditioning filter.
Altogether, they collected 40 samples and processed over 5,500 antibiotic bioassays. Of these, some were chosen for further analysis and the most promising ones were eventually screened by Tan.
“You can expect that only about 1 to 5% of any isolates would really be a hit,” said Tan. “Some of the samples did have antibiotic properties that were already known—they had been previously discovered. It’s still really exciting for the kids when we tell them that we found an active antibiotic molecule in their sample.”
Several middle-school-aged youth (seated and in pink) are learning how to operate the robot to pick bacterial colonies. (Photo courtesy of Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab.)
Camarria Williams’s successful sample was of goose droppings near a pond in Chicago’s Garfield Park. Further testing revealed it to be a new compound of a known family of compounds that have shown disease-fighting properties in the past. The small differences in this molecule may indicate that its disease-fighting properties are different too. Much to everyone’s surprise, the sample also showed activity against several different cancer cell lines.
“We identified some compounds to be cyclic peptides, which are famous for having biologic activity,” said Murphy. “Amazingly, it turns out these particular compounds don’t have antibiotic activity, but they do have cytotoxic activity—activity against some cancer cell lines.”
Other compounds in the goose droppings are being tested for their antibiotic activities.
While the destination, in terms of discovering a new medicinal tool is potentially groundbreaking for the students that go through this program, the journey—the learning process—is the real reward.
Over 13 weeks, as the youth screened their samples, they engaged in STEM education sessions focused on Great Lakes environmental issues, biology, engineering, and robotics. Throughout, they were introduced to careers related to the subject at hand, including engineering and other sciences. For example, IISG’s Aquatic Education Associate Megan Gunn was interviewed by the kids about her experience doing Great Lakes science.
“We work with really small groups, so a lot of the mentoring is one to one,” said Tan. “We really notice kids and their interests. One cohort was really interested in the engineering component. And then our most recent cohort was more interested in biology. Since it’s such a small group, we can tailor to their interests.”
Tan shared her experience of watching some students become more confident over the course of the program. “I think the most rewarding part for me is seeing the progress as kids became more confident in themselves over time,” she said. “Like, yeah, I can program stuff. I can do this. I chose these samples.”
Murphy is hoping to continue bringing youth into the antibiotic discovery process, but perhaps with more of an emphasis on high school students.
“The idea would be to pair high school students with near-peer mentoring from graduate students and postdocs,” said Murphy. “All at a time when they’re starting to think about being adults themselves and are asking, is it possible for me to have a career in science?”
Jin Yi Tan (left) is teaching a high school student how to use the high-throughput robotic colony picker in the room to the right.
Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant is one of 34 Sea Grant programs supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in coastal and Great Lakes states that encourage the wise stewardship of our marine resources through research, education, outreach and technology transfer. In partnership with the University of Illinois Extension, and Purdue University Forestry and Natural Resources, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant brings science together with communities for solutions that work.
