{"id":142,"date":"2010-04-20T10:37:17","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T10:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/?p=142"},"modified":"2022-11-28T18:22:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T18:22:28","slug":"senior-biology-majors-present-research-at-virginia-collegiate-honors-council-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/2010\/04\/20\/senior-biology-majors-present-research-at-virginia-collegiate-honors-council-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Senior Biology Majors Present Research at Virginia Collegiate Honors Council Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

On April 17, 2010 three senior biology majors working on independent research projects with Dr. Kristian Hargadon presented posters of their work at the Virginia Collegiate Honors Council Conference held at Virginia Wesleyan College.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Curtis Read and Justin Odanga have spent their spring semester exploring\u00a0microbial biodiversity, isolating and identifying 6 species of bacteria from the environment and assessing the antimicrobial resistance\/suscueptibility of these organisms.\u00a0 Building off of skills learned in the lab portion of H-SC’s Microbiology course,\u00a0Curtis and Justin\u00a0employed a variety of diagnostic techniques to identify these species, including Gram stains, endospore stains, carbohydrate fermentation tests, nitrate reduction tests, catalase tests, motility tests, and several other biochemical tests.\u00a0\u00a0Among the species identified were Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus malodoratus, Enterobacter agglomerans<\/em>, and Bacillus polymyxa<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0In what will undoubtedly become deparmental legend, this latter organism (B. polymyxa<\/em>), which is very common,\u00a0shares many\u00a0diagnostic properties with Bacillus anthracis<\/em>, the causative agent of anthrax.\u00a0 While their professor was indeed thrilled that this pathogen was not isolated on campus, the prospect definitely provided moments of excitement for Curtis and Justin, who\u00a0were much more enthusiastic about\u00a0potentially having found this organism!\u00a0 Despite having their chances for\u00a0instant fame ruined by their subsequent identification of a much less\u00a0“exciting” organism,\u00a0their results were indeed quite provocative and demonstrated striking patterns of bacterial resistance to the anibiotic penicillin.\u00a0\u00a0Such findings do\u00a0have significant implications regarding\u00a0potential pathogenecity of these organisms, and future work may illuminate whether\u00a0these\u00a0organisms are also resistant to common antimicrobials used to control environmental microbes. \u00a0Curtis and Justin showed extreme dedication and\u00a0enthusiasm throughout their project and received numerous compliments about their work at the VCHC conference.<\/p>\n

Chad Harte, who received a cash prize for the Best Poster Award at the conference,\u00a0presented his research\u00a0on a particular cell type of the immune system known as the dendritic cell.\u00a0 These cells\u00a0play critical roles in immunity.\u00a0 As immature cells, they\u00a0provide immediate protection against invading pathogens;\u00a0\u00a0upon maturation, they\u00a0drive subsequent, more specific cells of the immune\u00a0system to effectively respond to and eliminate the invaders.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Because dendritic cells are found in relatively low numbers in model organisms, these cells are difficult to study under experimental conditions.\u00a0 Therefore, Chad’s work focused on characterizing an immature dendritic cell line known as JAWSII.\u00a0 In particular, Chad evaluated the resonsiveness of these cells to the maturation stimuli lipopolysaccharide and lipteichoic acid.\u00a0 He monitored dendritic cell\u00a0responsiveness to these stimuli\u00a0using the\u00a0reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction technique to evaluate the expression of genes associated with dendritic cell maturation.\u00a0 In exciting results, Chad demonstrated that\u00a0exposure of the JAWSII cell line to maturation stimuli does upregulate\u00a0the expression of certain\u00a0genes encoding proteins essential to subsequent stimulation of immune responses.\u00a0 These findings suggest that this cell line can be used as an effective model for the study of dendritic cells, and this work will serve as a “springboard” for subsequent work in Dr. Hargadon’s lab that aims to evaluate the influence that tumor cells have on dendritic maturation and activation.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Chad<\/a>

Chad Harte, recipient of the VCHC Best Poster Award<\/p><\/div>\n

\n
\"Curtis<\/a><\/a><\/dt>\n
Curtis Read (left) and Justin Odanga (right)<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 17, 2010 three senior biology majors working on independent research projects with Dr. Kristian Hargadon presented posters of their work at the Virginia Collegiate Honors Council Conference held at Virginia Wesleyan College.\u00a0 Curtis Read and Justin Odanga have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/biology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}