• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Middle School Student Makes Important Biomedical Discovery In Goose Poop

December 13, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Imagine knowing you’ve already made an important contribution to biomedical research before you’ve even started high school. This is a reality for a young Chicago student who recently found a bacterium that exhibits antibiotic activity and produces a novel compound that slows the growth of human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells in the lab. Where did this startling discovery come from? Well, goose poop of course.

This budding young middle school scientist was part of a community partnership with a local university that engages kids from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds. The team partnered with Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago, which allowed them to engage with middle schoolers as part of a 14-week applied science program.

Advertisement

Inequality in educational resources, especially for STEM subjects, has often prevented some students from accessing these fields when they’re older. However, a team from the University of Illinois at Chicago, led by Brian Murphy, has established a partnership that engages such groups at an early stage in their educational development. The hope is that, by providing them with a chance to conduct real, high-quality research, these young students will come to see themselves as scientists and explore related careers in the future.

As Murphy’s lab is focused on finding antibiotics from natural sources, the students helped scour their local communities for environmental samples. Before someone suggests this was just a way to outsource sample gathering, the students then followed up on the stages of scientific processing, especially for programming a specialized robot that removes bacterial colonies from growth plates and tests them for antibiotic activity.

“All experiments are performed under the guidance of graduate student or postdoctoral scientist volunteer mentors”, the researchers explain in their study.

“Each student collected 3 samples of their choice from Garfield Park in Chicago, IL. Students pretreated and diluted their samples before plating each one on three different media types [….] While their bacteria incubated, they practiced block programming on LEGO EV3 modules in preparation for robot operation. When their environmental diversity plates exhibited sufficient bacterial growth, students programmed and operated the Hudson Robotics RapidPickMP to pick all distinguishable colonies from their environmental diversity plates and transfer them onto dual-sided agar plate assay (DAPA) bioassay plates.”

Advertisement

During their search, one student returned with a sample of goose poop that contained a strain of bacteria called Pseudomonas idahonensis – a species that had previously been isolated from rainbow trout in Idaho (idahonensis means “from Idaho). The student, Camarria Williams, and Jonathon Rodriguez, Technology Program Manager at Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago, are listed as co-authors of the paper

It was concluded that this bacterium had antibiotic activity and even produced a completely new-to-science compound. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry, the university researchers were able to determine that orfamide N was not actually responsible for the antibiotic activity observed before. However, the compound did hinder the growth of human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells when it was tested in the laboratory.

It is believed that further testing could reveal additional advantageous properties of this new molecule.

This project demonstrates that it is possible to combine educational outreach with natural product discovery research while also showing how important it is to develop strong relationships between universities and local communities. In particular, it offers typically under-represented students a chance to be scientists themselves and to make incredible discoveries like this! 

Advertisement

Guess we should also thank the goose for providing its poop as well.

The study is published in the journal ACS Omega.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Twitter accelerates again with Bitcoin tips, NFTs, recorded Spaces, creator fund and more
  2. Elon Musk announces Tesla to move headquarters to Austin
  3. Rebound Relationships: What They Are And Why They Can Work Better Than You Think
  4. The Cosmic Coincidence That Gives Us The Total Solar Eclipse

Source Link: Middle School Student Makes Important Biomedical Discovery In Goose Poop

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Saturn And Neptune Will Reach Their Brightest In Days – And Look For Saturn’s Temporary Beauty Spot
  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version