Inspire Magazine 2021

SCF Biotech Students Document Novel Discovery with DNA Research

Biotechnology students at SCF found and documented an antibiotic-producing bacteria with DNA that may have never been cataloged before.

The work, conducted by several students in cloning small sections of the bacteria’s DNA strands that were collected by former nursing student Danielle Pearman '18 near Fort DeSoto State Park for a class in 2015, was published in a repository DNA database of the National Institutes of Health.

Cara Ruhnke '19, a recent SCF graduate who worked on the project, described how the team cloned the samples and sent them to a lab for DNA sequencing.

“When we got our sequences back, we searched across the database for similar sequences, and we discovered there were not any within what they consider the standards of a species or type; that we had something novel.”

The sequences were published in the GenBank database, which is administered by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The publication includes the students’ names and the professors who worked with them, SCF Associate Professor Eric Warrick and Professor Matthew Thomas.

“I got an email from Dr. Thomas that said, ‘go check out this NCBI entry,’” Ruhnke recalled, “and it had my name on it. That was pretty cool. I was pretty proud of myself, considering that on an associate-level college degree, we’ve got publications, which is pretty unheard of. Most associate-level degrees aren’t publishing anything, at least in science.”

But it’s exactly what Warrick says SCF’s Biotechnology program aims to do. Warrick and Dr. Thomas prepare their students to be workforce ready in laboratories and other research settings right away. The skills learned and coursework completed are also transferable for students planning to pursue bachelor’s degrees or even higher levels of scientific education.

“We don't want just to teach a skill set; we want to teach a skill set with an application to it,” Warrick explained. “Students are more interested, they're more engaged in the classroom, making better connections to what they're doing.”

In addition to Pearman and Ruhnke, other students involved and credited in this project were Madison Wilson '19, Eva Geygan '20, Krissy D'Agostino '19, Hailey Harris '20 and Luis Pichardo.

Since indications are that this is a novel species, Warrick says the next step in this project is fully mapping the Fort DeSoto sample’s DNA.

“We know it's an antibiotic-producing microbe. We don’t know what that antibiotic is yet, its structural or genetic analysis,” he said.

Discovering new antibiotic producers is growing in importance as bacteria continue to develop stronger resistance to existing medicines. The work being done by SCF Biotechnology students could one day have important impacts on medical research.

“Once we get the whole genome sequence, there is annotation software that can make predictions about its potential uses,” Warrick said.