Daphne Ezer, a senior at High School South, is trying to prove her father, a college professor, wrong. The two have a playful competition — he thinks physics is better, while she thinks biology is.##M:[more]##
Judging by her enthusiasm as she recalls her research on the DNA of the brine shrimp — an underwater creature that can go into a hibernation more intense than that of a bear — she may have a leg up on him.
Her father, Tal Ezer, an oceanographer at Old Dominion University in Virginia, previously worked as a research scholar at Princeton University for 18 years. The daughter, only 17, is already in her second year of interning in the biology research lab at Rutgers University. And her work has already been published in the online National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database.
Daphne’s introduction to high-powered scientific research comes though her mentorship in the Waksman Club at High School South, which allows students to perform molecular biology research. It was initiated by the Waksman Institute at Rutgers University.
“What they do is train students during the summer, as well as their teachers,” said Meenakshi Bhattacharya, a biology teacher at the high school and the club’s adviser. “They teach us how to do basic techniques at a higher level than students do at the high school level.”
The teacher and two students go for an intensive four-week training course each year over the summer from July to August at Rutgers and learn how to sequence various inserts of genes from the brine shrimp and then come back and teach other students at the club how to do it.
“The reason we do it is it’s known to have a very long dormancy. If we sequence the genome, maybe we can find the sequence to how they do it and maybe apply it to humans farther down the line,” Bhattacharya said.
The brine shrimp is known to stay in a dormant state for as long as 12 years, and studying its genes can hold a myriad of possibilities for scientists trying to make breakthroughs with medicine. Ezer is one of the students in the club studying its genes, and one of the few who have had their scientific research published since the club was founded at the school three years ago.
“I started with it my freshman year because it sounded really interesting to do hands-on research at an undergrad student level,” Ezer said.
Studying the gene that causes the hibernation might show how it works under conditions of stress, and could be helpful in finding out how humans react to stress. While it is an idea far down the line, Bhattacharya said one of her students also suggested studying how the hibernation gene works could help improve space travel. It would take more than a human lifetime to travel to some of space’s outer stretches, and advances in science with regard to hibernation might be able to help keep astronauts alive on missions so far away, she explained.
High School South is one of the 20 schools from New Jersey and surrounding states, like Connecticut, that has a Waksman club. The students in the club are given a cloned section of DNA from the brine shrimp that has already been isolated. Then, the students sequence it, and perform software analysis on it using what is known as bioinformatics.
The bioinformatics is done on a computer using a program known as Chromos. For students to learn how to use the software to analyze the sequences is quite a feat itself, Bhattacharya said. The students then use a process known as gel electrophoresis — “a highly technical term only molecular biologists known about” — which is a process of separating the DNA using its inherent characteristics, Bhattacharya said.
From time to time, the students in the club go back to Rutgers and report on what they have found and have an opportunity to present questions or concerns to troubleshoot any of the problems they are having in their research.
Once the students are done with the gel electrophoresis, the students travel to GE Healthcare headquarters in Piscataway to use their machines to sequence the DNA. They make poster presentations on their findings during the first week of June.
And the 30 students in the club are doing all this work as an extracurricular activity. They stay after school once a week from 3 to 4 p.m., and spend their study halls during the week doing lab work. Every year, the club is given about 160 clones of the genes to analyze and because each has so many sequences, every student may work on one or two at a time. Students who are successful in their analyses are sometimes published in the NCBI gene database.
Ezer is one of those students. As she got to work on her two samples, she first noticed that they contained two different types of rRNA, the form of RNA that is a fundamental structural element of ribosomes.
Initially, an adviser at the institute told her to ignore those sequences and look more closely at the mRNA, the form of RNA that carries information from DNA in the nucleus to the ribosome sites of protein synthesis in the cell.
But her curiosity led her to further analysis, and she discovered that the rRNA actually “had this feature called a “poly A tail,” she said. “This is supposed to be only found in mRNA, and not in rRNA.”
“It was a really surprising discovery,” she said. “Only the month before, there was a major entry on this in a really big journal about this phenomenon.” She said it was surprising because textbooks have always distinguished mRNA and rRNA by the poly A tail.
After being published online, Ezer was one of only two people to get a internship in a microbiology research lab at Rutgers University as a junior. She still works there and is in the process of analyzing a certain gene that has the ability to change mercury into a less toxic form. Her research involves examining whether this type of gene can be used in helping to remediate areas of the Adirondacks watershed.
Working there and joining the Waksman Club, where she is primarily teaching other students in the club, has opened her eyes to what she wants to do in the future. In addition to biology itself, Ezer would like to get into computer programming for biology. “I’m looking for colleges that have computer science and biology together,” she said. “I wouldn’t have even known about it if I hadn’t been in the Waksman Club.”
Among those schools that have such a program is the California Institute of Technology, one of her top choices. And the lifelong Plainsboro resident certainly has built up quite the resume for her college applications. In addition to the Waksman Club, she also does the Science Olympiad and is part of the Math Honors Society and Spanish Honors Society at the school.
Other current students, like Ezer, have also been published as a result of their work, including Jason So and Jessica Cheng. Cheng, a senior at the high school, is also from Plainsboro. She found a second sub-unit of the mitochondrial sequence in her sample.
The Waksman Club, she said, “is allowing me to see another side of science and of the world in general. I see that there are discoveries made every single day, and I can see it for myself as opposed to just reading it in the news.”
Bhattacharya, who has done research in molecular biology before becoming a teacher, said the club has been attracting many students since it began three years ago. The success of the club, the amount of work put in by the students, and some of their achievements, was cited as one of the reasons school officials decided to offer an independent study course in the sciences in the revised program of studies for next year, so that students can receive credits for embarking on such complicated projects.
“It’s really exciting to be on this cutting edge of research,” Ezer said. “Here, everything is surprising and new. It’s not something that labs have done over and over again. It definitely prepares you for a career in research.”
