SoundBites newsletter February 2016

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President: Tuajuanda C. Jordan, PhD

Andy Koch, associate professor of chemistry

February 2016

Andy Koch has been a member of the faculty since 1997.

You received the 2015 Braude Award from the American Chemical Society recognizing outstanding research involving students. Is this award extra special being that you teach at a liberal arts college?

Most certainly! A vast majority of research done in my field is accomplished at research-1 institutions by a small army of well-trained graduate students and post-doctorates working together to acquire enough results to draw interesting conclusions. At St. Mary’s we are all working towards getting our students to take ownership of their education; this award made me feel that the outside world recognized not just my efforts as an undergraduate research mentor, but all of the work at SMCM that goes into developing our students. It was a great honor, and I feel I share it with our entire community.

How did you come to be a chemistry professor?

Both my parents were chemistry professors at Ithaca College.

Growing up in an environment where learning everything was important taught me that nothing you learned was a waste of time, unless you chose to waste your time by not putting in the effort, and I knew quite early that I wanted to share this philosophy. I must admit that I fell in love with education long before I became a good student; I saw the benefit in learning everything even when I refused to put in the effort. By the time I finished college and was heading off to graduate school, I knew I wanted to teach at an institution where diversity in education would be appreciated. I knew the small liberal arts college was the place for me.

Outside of class, you’re a botanist, brew master and chef. How do these interests connect?

What my work and hobbies all have in common is that you learn new skills, observe what happens when you apply these skills, and draw conclusions that

lead to new projects. In the case of brewing and cooking you also end up with products that can make you a popular person at dinner time. As an undergraduate, I minored in art; I love art and the esthetics behind things. Creating things that I find beautiful for one reason or another brings me pleasure, and stretching your mind to add creativity to your work helps keep the mind young.

It’s been reported that your third child is the chemistry department’s nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. What is so special about it?

If you ask my wife, the NMR is more like my mistress than our third child. I spend far too much time with the NMR because I really love the information it provides. The NMR really amounts to being our eyes when it comes to determining what happened during a chemical reaction.

There are eight Nobel laureates who earned their prize based on the theory and applications of NMR spectroscopy. This instrument supports about half of our SMP projects, so if I want SMCM students to work with me, the NMR must be up and running.

We were awarded an NSF grant to purchase our current NMR in 2000, and thanks to a lot of TLC, it still works.

What do you say to a prospective student to see if ORGANIC chemistry is their real mojo?

I wouldn’t say anything to a prospective student or even a first-year student to try and get them interested in organic. If it’s their real mojo, they will discover it in their sophomore year when they take organic chemistry. When I talk to prospective students, or even our students, I ask them to search their souls for what they love to do, not a field they have been exposed to, but what they really enjoy doing. This is where they will find happiness, as long as they are willing to work hard for it.

After all, if you love it, you’ll put a lot of time into getting good at it.

Want More?

News, Student and Faculty accomplishments: www.smcm.edu/news Campus Events Calendar: www.smcm.edu/events/calendar 240.895.2000 | www.smcm.edu | SoundBites is produced by the Office of Marketing, Strategic Communications and Web Services at St. Mary’s College of Maryland Photography by Bill Wood

A newsletter for the community, faculty, staff and students.

Legislative Reception 2016 “Opportunity Rising” was the theme of the Legislative Reception hosted by Delegate Deborah Rey and held on Jan. 27 at the Lowe House Office Building in Annapolis, Md. President Jordan welcomed the Maryland legislators and spoke of St. Mary’s College’s talented students, faculty and alumni. Those called on to speak of their programs were Mia Bullock’14, MAT’15, a first-year teacher; Carrie Patterson (prof. of art) with Sophie Caradine-Taber ‘17 for the Tiny House Project; and Dario Durastanti ’16 with Troy Townsend ’07 (visiting asst. prof. of chemistry) for spray-on solar cell technology.

Bookbag to Briefcase: The 12th Annual Bookbag to Briefcase conference connected 67 students with 35 alumni for a series of lectures and networking sessions. The conference, held each January, aims to give graduating seniors a competitive edge as they prepare for life after St. Mary’s.

Top photo: Liza Moore ’16 and Bianca Calin ’16 Bottom photo: Kent Wilson ’03 and Kate Somerville ‘16

F a c ulty Res earc h S po t l i g h t :

Craig Streu/Pam Mertz

Biochemists Shed New Light on Using Photoactivated Compounds for Targeted Therapy Among cancer treatments, targeted chemotherapies are valued for minimizing side effects and wholebody toxicity, while Streu delivering damage to malignant cells. To achieve these goals, a chemotherapeutic agent must selectively bind to or Mertz target tumor cells or, alternatively, become active in tumor cells but remain inactive elsewhere in a patient’s body.

Researchers at St. Mary’s College of Maryland recently focused their attention on the chemotherapeutic use of an azo- compound (azo- compounds contain a nitrogen-nitrogen double bond) that they designed to convert from an inactive to an active form when exposed to blue or near-UV wavelength light. The compound studied, azo-combretastatin A4, was synthesized

by Craig N. Streu, asst. prof. of chemistry and biochemistry.

After working with azo-resveratrol (resveratrol is the “longevity compound” in red wine), Streu turned his attention to the compound combretastatin A4, whose structure resembles resveratrol and – even more interestingly – is similar to colchicine. Colchicine, first isolated from the autumn crocus in 1820, has long been recognized for its medicinal uses.

Among its effects, colchicine is known to impair cell division by disrupting a cell’s microtubules.

Drugs bind to their targets much like keys fit into locks, so changing the shape of a drug often alters the effect on its biological target. “The active form of azo-combretastatin A4 has the double bond in the cis conformation,” explained Streu.

“That’s the photioisomerizable bond, and the shape of the molecule changes around that nitrogen-nitrogen double bond: In one conformation [trans] the molecule is really flat, in the other conformation [cis], the molecule is twisted.”

When azo-combretastatin A4 is converted from its trans (inactive) to cis (active) form by exposure to blue or UV light, the active form has the same effect as colchicine: It impairs normal cell division by binding to tubulin

What’s Happening in Sports Fresh from their winter training trip in Florida, the Seahawk men’s and women’s swim teams will be hosting the CAC Men’s and Women’s Swimming Championships on February 19-21.

molecules, preventing them from assembling into microtubules.

“Tubulin polymerizes and depolymerizes, and that polymerization makes long chains that are really important for mitosis, the cell division process,” said Streu. “If you can interfere with the way these long chains of tubulin are assembled, you interfere with the cell-division process.”

Students Present Research at National Meeting

What did you do during winter break? Derrick Fokala ‘15 and Amber Major ‘18, with Liz Leininger (asst. prof. of neurology) presented data from their SMP and SMURF projects on the hormonal control of frog vocalizations in Portland, Oregon at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

Sensational Faculty

To investigate the effect of azo-combretastatin A4 on living cells, Pamela Mertz, assoc. prof. of chemistry and biochemistry, tested the compound in HeLa cell cultures.

Widely used in research, HeLa cells were originally derived from an aggressively growing human cervical cancer.

The goal in this study was to determine how activated azo-combretastatin A4 would affect HeLa cells. “Tubulin is an important protein that forms the cytoskeleton of the cell, which is very important in terms of the overall architecture of holding the cell together,” Mertz noted.

“A number of different types of chemotherapeutic drugs have been developed specifically to target tubulin. One advantage of trying to develop these more targeted compounds that you can activate with light, is that you’d have a tool for being more specific, targeting a particular area in the body vs. the whole body.”

The researchers cultured HeLa cells for five days in the presence of various concentrations of azo-combretastatin A4. One group of cultures was grown in the absence of light, another group was exposed to 10 seconds of 400 nm light (violet: 400-450 nm; UV: 300400 nm) every 30 minutes.

Light-exposed HeLa cell cultures showed complete cell death at azo-combretastatin A4 concentrations as low as 500 nM. Dark-grown cultures displayed little or no toxic effects, even with azo-combretastatin A4 concentrations as high as 100 uM. Thus, when tested in cell cultures, photoisomerized azo-combretastatin A4 was at least 200 times more toxic to malignant cells than was its inactive form.

Chemistry and biochemistry faculty hosted 28 Leonardtown High School AP Chemistry students in November. High school students performed an organic synthesis, witnessed the creation of molten iron from rust, discussed the impact of stereochemistry and experimented with the the NMR, infrared spectrometer and X-Ray fluorometer.

Kudos to...

Todd Forsgren (visiting asst. prof. of art) has published the book “Ornithological Photographs.” The book has been widely reviewed by publications including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph, Nature, Slate, Wired, and Le Temps.

David Froom (prof. of music) had his original compositions performed in Boston, Tokyo, Virginia and Washington, DC during the fall. Froom also gave a lecture and workshop on the creative process for advanced students in the Dept. of Architecture at Howard University.

Garrey Dennie (assoc prof of history) is author of the op-ed “A Caribbean colossus: the Ralph Gonsalves ascendancy” published in Dec. 2015 on Searchlight.com.

Bob Paul (prof. of biology) has been named board chairman of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay.

Jerry Gabriel (visiting asst. prof. of English) was selected from among 1,763 eligible applicants to receive the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) creative writing fellowship.

Susan Goldstine (assoc. prof. of mathematics) has accepted a position as associate editor for the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on connections between mathematics and the arts.

Katharina von Kellenbach (prof. of religious studies) gave opening remarks in Berlin at the German Film Premiere of “Regina: The Story of the World’s First Woman Rabbi Regina Jonas - A Poetic Documentary” by Diana Groó this past November. She also presented a paper on the history of her discovery of the archived papers of Rabbi Regina Jonas, who was born in Berlin in 1902, ordained in 1935, and killed in Auschwitz in 1944.