When Eric Miller, professor of microbiology and interim department head, and Sue Carson, biotechnology academic coordinator and assistant professor of plant biology, received funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for an innovative research class for freshmen, they both were extremely excited about the course’s potential.
“There aren’t a lot of opportunities for first-year research,” Carson said. “Science education studies have shown that students who get involved in research end up staying in science, doing better in their classes and are more likely to go into research.”
Miller also feels the class helps students understand the reality of scientific study.
“It’s important for students to have fun in science: to be curious, to structure questions that are really interesting to answer and to start getting the experience in the laboratory as to how you explore those and answer those questions,” Miller said. “If you take that out of the learning educational process, you take out one of the biggest motivators for being a scientist.”
Students were equally eager to give the class a try.
“To me the course sounded exciting because it’s not the standard type of lecture, where you’re just learning material,” Heather Brown, a freshman in animal science, said. “Without actually doing research, or when you do the very set procedures in a basic lab class where it’s an experiment that’s been repeated, you don’t understand what it’s like to do research that doesn’t have a known end.”
The students study bacteriophage, of which there are 10 to the 31st power varieties, according to Miller.
“The biodiversity that’s there is huge, and it’s fascinating,” Carson said. “There are so many different genes that do different things that aren’t even discovered.”
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, meaning each kind of bacteria on the planet has several different phages that infect it. This diversity opens up phages for multiple uses, including, according to Carson, predating antibiotics as a means to kill pathogenic bacteria.
“[The study of phage] provides a better insight into evolutionary biology, new genome sequences for the study of evolution of genomes and can provide new biotechnology tools for diagnostics, therapeutic and treatment of microbial diseases,” Miller said.
The class focused on one application in particular.
“The big idea is that if our phage can kill the bacteria we are working with, that phage will have a 40 percent chance of killing Mycobacterium tuberculosis, an often deadly lung disease with which an estimated one in three people world-wide are infected,” Alan Bohn, a freshman in microbiology, said. “The translation I tell my parents is that we are essentially starting with dirt, finding viruses and learning as much as we can about them.”
In the fall, the students started by gathering soil samples and used multiple rounds of plating to isolate a unique phage.
“What we do is grow a big sea of bacteria, which is visible, and there’s little holes that occur where the phage is eating it,” Nick Allen, a freshman in zoology, said. “You pick [the phage] up out of that. We kept plating them over and over until we were reasonably certain we had a very clear sample of phage.”
The students then took their phage, extracted DNA to study the following semester and, via transmission electron microscopy, got an up-close look at the phage.
“After a whole semester of just staring at a round Petri dish, now you suddenly could actually see what this thing you’ve been working on for the whole time,” Allen said.
At the semester’s conclusion, the class chose one phage to be sequenced at a nearby facility, an expensive process that the HHMI grant covered. As they wait for the sequence to return, the students are examining a draft of the genomes. Unlike traditional laboratory experiences, this process includes quite a bit of guesswork.
“We go through the sequence and we figure out where the different genes are and what they do,” Allen said. “And for most of them, we have no idea.”
Moreover, fitting a research project within the confines of a semester is very different from the traditional approach to a syllabus.
“You can plan for things you hope will be happening in the course, but they don’t always turn out that way,” Miller said.
Nonetheless, the benefits of the class have exceeded expectations as students branch out into other laboratories on campus and develop as researchers.
“Many of the students in the class have applied to summer research programs and have pursued undergraduate research experiences in the department of microbiology and other departments on campus,” Miller said. “They take their freshman experience as a foundation of basic skills they can take into a research lab.”
“The students have become a lot more independent and a lot more able to figure things out for themselves, simply because we couldn’t answer all the questions for all of the students all at once,” Carson said. “If they get sick enough of waiting, they’ll actually figure it out themselves.”
As many other institutions applied for funds to create similar classes, students also found support and collaboration online.
“We can get on the wiki and talk with other students in the program, get their opinions on different things, learn what did and did not work for them and even win prizes for answering weekly questions,” Bohn said.
Ultimately, students feel this class taught them more than most of their coursework, giving them a realistic view of laboratory life and making the scientific principles practical.
“I feel like this is the best way to learn,” Allen said. “You have to learn it because you’re using it.”
Carson is equally impressed with the students’ progress.
“The goal is to have them be the experts and be able to do it themselves,” Carson said. “One thing that has really blown my mind is that the students in the class, when they do their presentations, they sound like graduate students. They don’t sound like freshmen.”
