Spring Issue 2012
BREAKTHR
Tufts’ Undergraduate Science Magazine
Volume III
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How
CLIMATE CHANGE is changing TEA
Story Page 6
OTHER STORIES FOUND INSIDE: Soft-body Robots Page 7
Purification Crystal-clear H2O Page 8
Nanoparticles and medicine Page 11
‘Best Bees’ Honeybee health Page 16
FROM THE EDITOR
OUR STAFF
Dear Readers, As students today, we can benefit from increased accessibility to a seemingly unlimited collection of information in a range of subject areas and points in time – from historical documents to recent scientific studies. While having this multitude of resources at our fingertips is undoubtedly advantageous, it also presents us with some exciting challenges. These challenges don’t apply only to students writing research papers, but to anyone looking for reliable information or an effective way to manage it. Faculty members conducting science research, such as the projects presented in this issue, must keep abreast of relevant and current studies while also managing streams of their own new data. How to manage data, where to start looking for information, how to use new research technologies, and how to find reliable sources are all questions explored by the librarians at Tisch Library. Engineering, Mathematics, and Business Librarian Karen A. Vagts sees aspects of science and problem solving in addressing these questions. For students, the need for this scientific problem solving in research often arises, when an overload of sources makes it “challenging for a student to know where to start,” Regina Fisher Raboin, Science Research and Instruction Librarian and Data Management Services Coordinator, explains. The subject specialists at Tisch Library can help both students and faculty navigate through this mass of information that, without help, might be overwhelming. With all their experience working with these resources and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subject areas, librarians like Raboin and Vagts are also familiar with groundbreaking technology changes relating to bibliographic science research. The shift to web-based sources brings the opportunity for tools relating to data downloading and visualization. “There’s a potential for interesting discovery through these things,” Vagts explains. The growth of these tools in what Vagts describes as and a “dynamic landscape” is impressive, from social networking for tracking and sharing citations to the incorporation of handheld devices for accessing data. Another development of significance to science research is the increasing need for data management plans. These plans, according to Raboin, are necessary for the preservation and distribution of results and data for research studies. The National Science Foundation now has a data management plan requirement for grants, for example. It’s clear that the amount of available information will keep growing as research continues, data is amassed, and discoveries are made. It will be our responsibility to continue managing and organizing this information in the most effective way possible. We hope that Breakthrough has done its job of condensing our own investigations into a collection of interesting articles on some of the latest scientific developments on the Tufts campus and beyond. Thanks for reading! Catherine Hoar Editor-in-Chief
Cover image by Lucia Smith Additional illustrations by Lucia Smith
Editor-in-Chief Catherine Hoar Business Manager Stephen Walsh Managing Copy Editor Sonya Bakshi Layout Designers Megan Berkowitz Lucia Smith Public Relations Chairs Julia Hisey Ming Lin Assistant Editors, Writers, and Artists Sam Bashevkin Shana Friedman Manvi Goyal Alice Haouzi Ashley Hedberg Eric Kernfeld Sonja Kytömaa Linda Le Chinami Michaels Allister McGuire Daniel McNeely Brian Pedro Emily Steliotes Santosh Swaminathan Photographers Stephanie Sammann
The opinions expressed in each article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff.
Breakthrough is a publication of the Tufts Undergraduate Research Journal, recognized by the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Judiciary and funded by the TCU Senate tuftsresearch@gmail.com
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BREAKTHR
UGH
Tufts’ Undergraduate Science Magazine Spring 2012 Volume III, Issue 2
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Book Review The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales By Alice Haouzi
From the Editor
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Interview Breakthrough Interviews Dr. James Adler By Eric Kernfeld
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Book Review Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are By Sonja Kytömaa
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To your health Selena Ahmed ties global climate change, chemical changes in tea to human health By Megan Berkowitz
16 A Bzzzness For Bees
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The Future of Robotics Researchers at Tufts use insect muscle and fat cells for soft-bodied robots By Julia Hisey
Why boosting honeybee immunity is good for both hive and harvester By Lucia Smith
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The biological basis for our political views By Emily Steliotes
17 Opinion
Crystal Clear Dr. Mary Jane Shultz investigates the potential of titanium dioxide for water purification By Brian Pedro
18 Spinning Silk
A freshman’s perspective on research at Tufts By Ashley Hedberg
10 Life After Tufts
19 Amasia
Tufts graduate Sophia Cedola describes her experience as a clinical research assistant By Sophia Cedola
The Next Supercontinent
11 Nanoparticles
19 Citations
Exploring the Chemistry of Nanotechnology in Advances in Medicine By Linda Le and Allister McGuire
By Sam Bashevkin
Join Us!
Want to submit an article or join our staff? Come to one of our meetings (Tuesday nights, 9 p.m., Eaton 207) or e-mail us at tuftsresearch@gmail.com.
12 Faculty Profile
Professor Matthew Panzer By Daniel McNeely
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Faculty Profile:
Breakthrough Interviews James Adler
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Interview by Eric Kernfeld, a sophomore majoring Mathematics ematically, what you do is you can model it with partial differential equations, which are used to describe fluids. We have what’s known as the Navier-Stokes equation that describe [almost any] fluid—which if you figure out the analytic solution to, you’ll win a million dollars—and then you have Maxwell’s equations. You couple it together--you assume that the electric and magnetic fields act on this fluid, and likewise, the fluid motion is going to affect the electric and magnetic fields. So that’s what MHD is. It is an approximation, so in certain regimes it’s not accurate at all, but in other regimes, it is pretty good. From the numerical side of this, we assume, “Here’s my equations; now how am I going to model this on the computer?” The specific applications that we’ve been looking at are plasmas inside of fusion energy reactors. You have your hydrogen atoms, and you get them really hot and dense so that they fuse, but what happens is you’re forming a plasma. We like to model that, and you can use MHD to model that kind of behavior--instabilities or whatever. They’re building these things, they’re billions of dollars, and it would be better if we did it there [on a computer] before you flip the switch, right?
arlier this spring, Breakthrough had the pleasure of meeting Dr. James Adler, a recent addition to the Department of Mathematics. Growing up in New York City and later in Montauk, a community in the South Shore of Long Island, Adler spent part of his time in a Catholic school and part in the public school system. Adler double majored in math and physics in the Cornell class of 2004, augmenting his initial interest in physics by taking more and more math courses. After realizing that he would rather go to graduate school in applied mathematics than in physics, Adler entered a PhD program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He finished in 2009 and worked at the Pennsylvania State University until 2011. Dr. Adler joined the Tufts faculty this past September, and he’s now teaching staples of the math, engineering, and applied math curricula. He has also contributed to the decorations in the math department with a door full of “Far Side” comics. Below are selections from our interview with him. Eric Kernfeld: How did you find Tufts in the first place? James Adler: Well, they had a job opening in a field related to my research, which is important, and so I went for it. I know some people that work here, and they told me they like it, and it’s in a good location.
[Interviewer’s note: a mole is a unit in physics used to describe large amounts of particles at once. 10^23 is one hundred thousand billion billion. In applied math, a regime refers to a set of conditions under which a problem is studied. Partial differential equations are mathematical objects that take several separate quantities and describe the relationships among their rates of change. The challenge they set out is to find a simple formula for each quantity that can be calculated based only on the state of the system at a certain point (and the amount of time that has elapsed since that point). For some equations, nobody has yet succeeded in doing this. The Navier-Stokes equations are particularly important because they describe so many useful situations, such as air and water resistance on a vehicle or wind dragging on a skyscraper.]
EK: So you solve these magnetohydrodynamic equations? JA: MHD for short; we like acronyms. EK: Could you talk a little bit about where those come from and what they are mathematically? JA: So, magnetohydrodynamics is a set of equations or a theory that describes plasma physics. There’s lots of ways to describe plasma. So plasma is a 4th state of matter—charged gas, basically. If you ionize gas enough, it separates into charges. Plasmas are everywhere—fluorescent lights are plasma, the sun is a plasma—it depends on how hot and dense it is. So, in order to describe these things, there’s a whole bunch of different ways to do it. There are exact ways where you can track every single particle, but that’s 10^23 particles per mole, so that’s something a little bit infeasible. They have other things where they “average things out” and look at it as a distribution. What MHD does is instead of looking at this in the exact way, it says to just approximate this thing as a fluid that just happens to be charged—that’s the very simple way of thinking about it. Math-
EK: How did you get into coding and computers? JA: That was in grad school. It was the University of Colorado, and they had a really good scientific computing/numerical computation group there. I started
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taking classes in it; there was a required class in numerical analysis, so I took that, and I got to know the professor, who eventually became my advisor. I just realized that if I wanted to study these physical applications that were really complicated and interesting, I could get a lot more done on a computer using simulations. It’s a nice spiel because you get to learn about the application, the physics, you get to learn about the mathematics, and then you have this whole other separate problem: how do you convince the computer to deal with that, and then how do you visualize it? So there’s lots of interesting parts of science and technology that you have to think about. That’s a natural thing to apply mathematics to.
major… You find applied math in all sorts of projects, right? Almost all of the sciences? JA: And there’s even economic problems, sociology problems. Finance is a big one right now that people use a lot of applied mathematics for. EK: How does applied math coursework or math coursework compared to research that you end up doing? JA: That’s a good question. So, in mathematics, you need building blocks, right? Foundations for studying all these things. The courses are hopefully giving you these foundations… You have to know how to do these basic concepts of derivatives and integrals in order to do the more advanced mathematics. And so the goal of the applied math major is we’d like to train students to be better prepared for fields that they would maybe go into with an applied mathematics degree, including academia of course, but also including industry and even government. There are government labs where you’re going to do mathematical research or science research. What are the basic tools that you would need to do that research? So that’s the goal. Of course we can’t cover everything, but we’d like to get in the basics of what you need to have a career involving applied mathematics.
EK: What kind of computing resources does it take to run these simulations? JA: It depends. If you’re trying to model the whole system, you probably need a lot of resources—you’ll need parallel computing and all sorts of things. But were looking at simplified models so we can actually do a much smaller sized simulation. We’ve been doing things on one-processor computers. I could do it on a laptop, maybe not to the resolution that you’d want to, but I have a machine that could do it. You might need a lot of memory if you’re not doing it in parallel, so, it depends. We have machines that do petaflops, and that involves thousands of processors all computing at the same time. That’s the other fun part about scientific computing. There’s this whole other question of architecture--using the right machines and making things efficient for this particular machine. What we’d like to do is show that you can get faster and faster and faster machines, but if the mathematics isn’t keeping up, you’re not going to get anywhere. These machines use a lot of power, and it’s better if you can make an algorithm that solves the thing quicker and with less resources. But it’s fun; you get to play with big machines. At some point, I had an account on a machine that was the same architecture as the fastest machine in the world--at the time. I didn’t have access to the machine that was the fastest in the world, but it was the same architecture. And now, of course, it’s not the fastest in the world. It’s already been beaten.
EK: So the basics would be the kind of things you see on the course list for the major? Things like analysis?
EK: Maybe statistics?
JA: Yeah, depending if that’s the route you’re going to go. If you go into academia and you do basic research, you of course need to know all these tools you’re going to need to apply in that research. If you go into government research or you go into industry, depending what level you’re going to be at, it’s more of how to think in that framework… You might not necessarily be using those mathematics on the job, but you at least know how to think mathematically, so you can learn about other strategies or algorithms or things like that. In some cases, though, you’re using the skills you develop—depending on what they want you to do.
[Interviewer’s note: Parallel computing uses multiple processors all at once, whereas traditional computers can only do one operation at a time. The petaflop, a measure of computing power, is one million billion arithmetic operations per second.] EK: I was going to ask for a few comments about the applied math
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JA: Yeah, and things like partial differential equations or differential equations in general. If you’re going to going to scientific computing, numerical analysis, numerical linear algebra, linear algebra is important for all this.
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To your health: D
r. Selena Ahmed has traveled across the world to study the plant behind the second-most widely consumed beverage in the world, after water: tea. Her research has shown that not only can humans taste how healthy tea is, that taste may be improving because of climate change-induced alterations in plant chemistry. Ahmed, a postdoctoral fellow at the Tufts Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, is researching the effect of climate change on healthful compounds in tea plants. Her work, which includes collaboration with researchers in environmental engineering, chemistry, anthropology, environmental economics and agricultural and soil science, has broken ground in its interdisciplinary approach to learning about the complex effects of climate change. “We first were interested in how [tea] plants were responding to climate changes, mostly temperature and precipitation,” Ahmed said. Using climate modeling performed by David Small of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ahmed and her team are beginning to study how current and future changes in temperature and precipitation will affect the chemistry of tea plants, specifically secondary metabolite production. Secondary metabolites are chemicals produced by plants in response to their environment. These chemicals often discourage herbivorous insects from consuming the plants but some – phenolic compounds, for instance, are a type of antioxidant – can be beneficial to human health. And even though they may not know it, tea drinkers can taste the benefits. “Consumers are able to taste the health-promoting compounds – that’s what you’re getting in your sensory experience in tasting a cup of tea,” Ahmed said, citing research she had performed in which tea tasters in the Yunnan Province, known as the motherland of tea, were found to prefer the taste of teas with more healthpromoting compounds. “Consumers will be willing to pay different amounts for those different types
Selena Ahmed ties global climate change, chemical changes in tea to human health of tea because they are able to taste the health benefits,” Ahmed said. Ahmed added that these health/taste preferences are then linked back to how much money farmers are making based on the healthfulness of their teas. “It has a huge global relevance,” Ahmed said, explaining that changes in the chemistry and therefore taste, healthfulness and appeal of tea for consumers can have an impact on global economics, given the massive world consumption of the product. Any chemical changes would also have an effect its bioactivity, or effects on living things. Tea is the basis for the only prescription botanical drug approved by the FDA. The active ingredient in Polyphenon E ointment, or Veregen, is an extract of green tea leaves. The drug is used as an external treatment for Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV, which can cause certain types of cancers. Ahmed noted that it was possible that the efficacy of these drugs would change if the chemical composition of the source tea leaves was altered and said that this is a possible future avenue for her research. For now, Ahmed’s research is focused on other health-promoting effects of tea, namely antioxidant properties, and what temperature fluctuations and increased precipitation associated with global climate change will do to those effects. During a trip to Yunnan, China this January, Ahmed and fellow researchers performed 100 farmer interviews on perceptions of climate change. “We were specifically looking at how farmers perceive that their crops and tea plants are responding to the climate,” Ahmed said. “A lot of the trends that the farmers are mentioning, how temperatures are getting warmer, how climate in general is becoming more unpredictable, how there are more wetter days, tie in really well with some of the trends that David Small has been showing us with his modeling.” After returning from China, Ahmed began growing tea plants in the greenhouse atop Barnum Hall. These plants, along with others she obtained later, are being used in experiments at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum starting this spring. The
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Photo by Megan Berkowitz
Dr. Selena Ahmed waters the tea plants growing in the Barnum greenhouse this winter.
arboretum includes greenhouse facilities that will allow Ahmed to manipulate temperature, humidity, precipitation and photoperiod, or amount of time the plants spend in light. Ahmed said that she plans to use these greenhouse facilities to mirror the climate changes shown by environmental modeling and farmer interviews. In addition to preparing her test samples, Ahmed and fellow researchers began pilot experiments on the Medford campus this semester that will determine the final, large-scale tests that will occur throughout spring and beyond. These tests are performed on spinach plants because they are easier and faster-growing than tea. Experimental protocols are tested on the spinach plants first for efficacy, and then applied to tea plants to gather useful data on changes in the plants’ chemistry. The first of these pilot experiments, performed in the fall, exposed spinach plants to rainfall typical to modern monsoon seasons. After only 30 minutes of rainfall, the spinach plants showed a near-statistically significant change in phenolic content in the roots of the plants, an indication that Ahmed’s research is headed in the right direction. Story by Megan Berkowitz, a sophomore majoring in Biology and English.
The Future of Robotics
Researchers at Tufts use insect muscle and fat cells for soft-bodied robots
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esearchers Emily Pitcairn and Amanda Baryshyan are using their knowledge of biological systems to develop and fuel soft-bodied robotic devices using insect muscle and fat cells. Emily Pitcairn is a first year doctoral student in the Tufts Trimmer Lab. She majored in biology with a minor in math at the University of Central Florida. There, she conducted three and a half years of undergraduate research in the field of molecular phylogenetics. This experience introduced her to the world of research. In particular, a tissue engineering class sparked her interest in biomimetics, leading her to Dr. Barry Trimmer’s Biomimetic Devices Laboratory. Pitcairn is collaborating on a project with a fourth year doctoral candidate, Amanda Baryshyan, in the Kaplan Lab. Baryshyan originally started the entire project involving insect muscles in soft-bodied robots. She majored in chemical engineer-
COURTESY OF EMILY PITCAIRN
One week old embryonic fat cells containing lipid droplets.
ing at Tufts and is presently pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering. Pitcairn and Baryshyan are working on a project in the field of biomimetics, where novel technology is produced through the inspiration and use of biological systems. Their overall goal is to create a soft-bodied robot actuated by insect muscles fueled by insect fat cells. Baryshan is focusing on growing and optimizing muscle cells while Pitcairn is concentrating on creating a cel-
lular fuel source for the muscles. The insect chosen to supply muscle cells is Manduca sexta, the tobacco hornworm, for its numerous advantages over mammalian cells. In contrast to mammalian cells, which need to be grown at body temperature, insect muscle cells can be cultured at room temperature. This characteristic of insect muscles is beneficial since robots would most likely be operating at room temperature. Another advantage to working with insect cells is that they can live for up to ninety days without changing the media, whereas mammalian cells in culture would die after a few days. Baryshyan has been trying to optimize muscle cells. Using her knowledge of developmental biology, she has discovered that embryos 19 hours into embryogenesis supply optimal muscle-specific stem cells that function well for the project. Baryshyan has been focusing on the metabolism of these muscle cells and figuring out the exact environment for the cells to grow to use them in robots. An additional aspect of growing muscle cells is ensuring that all of the cells receive the information to align correctly. In the lab, she has progressed as far as being able to place embryonic cells in a chamber of a specific shape with the correct conditions and differentiate them with 20-hydroxyecdysone, a steroid hormone that controls growth and development. This causes differentiation in the muscle precursor cells. The current constructs grow as large as 10mm in length. Pitcairn is centering her attention on the fuel source aspect of the project. She has chosen to work with fat cells, which is a novel idea for an energy source in soft-bodied robots. The main reason she chose to look at insect fat cells is, as she states, “The cells know how to communicate with one another. When the muscle cells need to fulfill their energy consumption needs, there is already a system in place with the fat cells so that the fat cells release the required nutrients.” Her choice of fat cells is supported by the fact that they are energy rich, can be manipulated by the same hormones as the muscle cells, and work well with insect
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muscles since this occurs in the biological system of the insect itself. Following in Baryshyan’s footsteps, Pitcairn has optimized the stage in embryogenesis to obtain the fat precursor cells. With these precursor cells, she then performs hormonal dosing studies with 20-hydroxyecdysone in order to optimize
COURTESY OF AMANDA BARYSHYAN
Muscle cells grown around a stainless steel pin.
differentiation and cell growth in culture. Currently, Baryshyan is working on generating macro-scale arrays of muscle constructs as well as measuring the force production of the constructs. Pitcairn is presently “studying the in vitro metabolism of the fat cells individually in order to understand the nutritional requirements of the cells in an artificial environment as well as investigating the different substrates the cells need to grow on.” Their research could lead to the development of soft-bodied robots that can “move in ways robots can’t move now,” as Baryshyan says. When asked about the effect of her work, Pitcairn said, “I think this research is groundbreaking because it will be the first example of generating a device that is both fueled and actuated by biological components. It will make people think about how biological materials can provide actuation and fuel sources for robotic and other mechanical engineering applications.” Story by Julia Hisey, a sophmore majoring in Biology.
Crvstal Clear C
lean water is something that many people take for granted; they assume that every possible contaminant has been removed long before the water ever reaches their faucets. Dr. Mary Jane Shultz, a Professor of Chemistry at Tufts, knows that this is not the case; she has spent the past decade researching new and improved methods of water purification. The main focus of Shultz’s research has been on the unique abilities of a certain compound, titanium dioxide (TiO2), to remove contaminants from water without leaving behind harmful side products. This is important, she explains, because “right now the method of choice [for water purification] is something called an advanced oxidation system, which is just a fancy way of saying you put peroxide in it and irradiate it with UV light. And that’s pretty good, it chews up most things in small pieces, and the end line of that is formaldehyde and acetone – the advanced oxidation system doesn’t touch either of those.” Formaldehyde and acetone can be harmful to the human body when ingested, and as Shultz points out, they become highly carcinogenic when chlorinated. Since chlorination of water is a necessary step in the water purification process because of the bacteria that it removes, Shultz recognized that there needed to be a way to
remove the formaldehyde and acetone from water before they could be chlorinated and become even more harmful: “The approach that I’ve taken recently is, ‘how can we get rid of that formaldehyde and acetone that are resistant?’ Since TiO2 has great oxidation potential, it can do it.” The way in which TiO2 can remove these contaminants from water is fairly simple; it all starts when TiO2 absorbs sunlight –“which we’ve got a lot of,” notes Shultz – creating what is called an electron-hole pair. In Shultz’s words, “a hole is just lack of an PHOTO BY BRIAN PEDRO A rock containing TiO2 particles electron, so if you’re going to do an oxidation, a lack of
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The main focus of Shultz’s research has been on the unique abilities of a certain compound, titanium dioxide (TiO2), to remove contaminants from water without leaving behind harmful side products.
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an electron is what you want. And it’s the large potential difference between them that means that TiO2 will oxidize everything – it’s pretty indiscriminate.” Although both TiO2 and current water purification methods use oxidation to get rid of contaminants, the difference is that TiO2 can also oxidize the formaldehyde and acetone that current methods leave behind. In other words, these potentially harmful compounds are broken down into harmless ones like water and carbon dioxide; then, the water can be chlorinated to kill bacteria without the risk of creating carcinogens by chlorinating formaldehyde or acetone. The one factor currently preventing the use of TiO2 in commercial water purification, Shultz says, is its efficiency:
PHOTO BY SONYA BAKSHI
Dr. Shultz’s research focuses on water purification methods.
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Dr. Mary Jane Shultz investigates the potential of titanium dioxide for water purification “Without modification, its photo-efficiency is somewhere around 1 ½ or 2%. It has to be above 15% to be commercially viable, so that’s quite a gap.” Recently, however, Shultz and her research group have been working to close that gap. They have found that if iron is added to the TiO2 particles used in purification, their efficiency can be increased. When TiO2 oxidizes compounds on its own, it transfers an electron to water and generates hydrogen, which according to Shultz is not a very efficient process. “But when you dope it with iron it doesn’t generate hydrogen at all – it transfers the electron to molecular oxygen, and we have plenty of that around. From an environmental point of view, that’s the best destination for the electron,” she explains. Through the addition of iron, the efficiency of this method has been brought up to around 7 ½%, meaning it is much closer to being ready for commercial use. Now that Shultz and her research group know that adding iron to the TiO2 particle can help improve its efficiency, the next step is trying to figure out why this is the case. “What we’re really working on is to understand the basic mechanism – why this has improved the photo-efficiency and how we might then boost it up even a bit more,” she says. Shultz believes that once they gain a good understanding of how exactly the addition of iron helps to improve the efficiency of this reaction, they will be able to bring that efficiency up to the required level. As Shultz put it, “Frankly, we’re probably about a year and a half away from me sitting here and telling you ‘this is the way you make a particle that’ll give you 15 percent.’” Story by Brian Pedro, a sophomore majoring in Biochemistry.
Dr. Shultz and the Rotary Evaporator
PHOTO BY SONYA BAKSHI
PHOTO BY SONYA BAKSHI
Dr. Shultz and Faith Dukes with the Evaporator
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Life After Tufts Tufts graduate Sophia Cedola describes her
COURTESY OF BREAKTHROUGH ARCHIVES
experience as a clinical research assistant
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tanding in the O.R. in the middle of the night, time has no meaning. You could tell me that it’s four, and if you clarified am or pm I would believe either. Just hours earlier I was sound asleep, but now here I am, adrenaline coursing through my body as I work with nurses, surgeons, and many others, all having received their own middle-of-the-night wake up call. We work as a unit, though we hail from hospitals all across the country. We are on an organ procurement - harvesting the viable organs from a brain dead donor and rushing them off to our respective recipients with the hopes of giving our patients a second lease on life. This year I am working as a clinical research assistant in the Columbia University Medical Center Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery. I graduated from Tufts in 2010 with a B.S. in psychology, completed a one year postbaccalaureate pre-medical program at Bryn Mawr, and am working at Columbia during my “glide year”
Transplants and the everimproving transplant technologies are awe-inspiring, but we mustn’t forget the truly amazing act of organ donation that makes all of this possible.
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while I apply to medical schools. Many post-bacs and other premed students work as research assistants during a glide year or two, with pay range, level of research involvement, and exposure - if any - to clinical work varying to a high degree. I was lucky enough to nab a job in which I am co-authoring abstracts and papers in addition to performing a variety of clinical duties (though the “salary”, especially in New York City, is verifiably unlivable). My most awe-inspiring responsibility is serving as the perfusionist for the Columbia-Presbyterian heart and lung transplant teams. As the perfusionist, I coordinate timing with the Columbia implant surgeons and anesthesiologist and am responsible for flushing the donor organs with a preservation solution. I take call 5-7 days a month, during which time I have to be ready to drop everything in order to join the transplant team on a harvesting run. These runs can happen at any time of day or night, but tend to happen at night when hospitals have vacant operating rooms. I travel with two surgeons by emergency vehicle, plane, or helicopter, depending on how far we are going and what the traffic is like. When it comes to hearts and lungs, time is of the essence. Organs are transported on ice in a hypothermic state surrounded
by a cold storage solution that allows for some nutrient and waste exchange, but without a source of oxygen, these organs are slowly deteriorating. Some organs are more oxygen dependent than others, and require shorter cold ischemic times. Whereas kidneys and livers, if properly removed and stored, can remain outside the body for up to 72 hours and 24 hours, respectively, hearts will only be good for about 4 hours (a few hours longer if it is a pediatric heart) and lungs only for about 6 hours1. This means that for Columbia’s patients with end-stage heart failure and lung disease, they do not only need to pray for a match (in blood type, body size, and other factors), they need to pray for a match that is in relatively close proximity. We normally will not go on a procurement if the flight to the donor hospital is longer than two hours for a heart or four hours for a lung. This can also mean that perfectly good organs will go to waste if the donor is in a low population area and potential recipients cannot be found close enough. Columbia University Medical Center is one of several institutions that are currently participating in a clinical trial for TransMedics’ Organ Care System (OCS), a machine designed to tackle the time crunch problem of heart transplants. After the donor heart is removed, it is attached to the OCS machine which pumps warm, nutrient- and oxygen-rich blood through the beating heart during transport, allowing hearts to remain viable outside the body for up to twelve hours2! Additionally, donor heart function can be improved after time on the OCS2; thus, theoretically we could take mediocre donor hearts from farther away places than we travel to now, and by the time we implant them into our patients they will be good and/or great donor hearts. On the other hand, the OCS is another step at which we can evaluate the function of the heart and decide post-explant and before the recipient is put under anesthesia whether or not we want to implant the heart into our patient. A similar machine to improve and assess donor lung function has been created, the XVIVO Lung Perfusion System. Again, after the donor lungs have been explanted from the donor they are attached to the XVIVO machine which perfuses the organs with a nutrient rich, bloodless solution and ventilates the lungs with oxygen3. These machines are helping to alleviate the time-sensitivity issues of heart and lung transplants, while other cutting edge research is attempting to tackle issues such as rejection and the general lack of enough available organs. Transplants and the ever-improving transplant technologies are awe-inspiring, but we mustn’t forget the truly amazing act of organ donation that makes all of this possible. Before the explant surgery we take a moment of silence to remember and honor the life of the donor, to exalt the selfless decision of the donor’s family to agree to donation, and to recognize the living legacy that the donor is leaving behind. Story by Sophia Cedola, Tufts Class of 2010.
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Nanoparticles
Exploring the Chemistry of Nanotechnology in Advances in Medicine
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ith applications from biological physics to synthetic chemistry, nanoparticle research has steadily made its mark as a prominent and promising area of study in the sciences. Though their size is difficult to grasp (one is about 10-9 meters), they certainly make no compromises when it comes to practical application. Nanoparticles have been used since the early 1990’s as a means of delivering small molecules in the body as an anti-cancer therapy.(Chen) The enthusiasm surrounding nanoparticles is incited by their facile synthesis and uniformity. The possibility of high synthetic control over the nanoparticles’ size is truly their most unique property, and is important because of the relationship between the size and properties of the particles. A bulk material, in contrast, maintains its physical properties at any size. The chemical variations
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...if the nanoparticle is functionalized with these complimentary proteins, the targeted cell will bind and accept atoms, ions and molecules from the nanoparticle carrier. By doing so, the cell will be effectively helping itself by the mechanisms put in place in the course of evolution.
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manifested in differently sized nanoparticles are often referred to as “quantum size effects” since the differences are dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics. As a result, a chemist may tune the properties of these nanoparticles for applications such as in vivo imaging or radiation therapy. Additionally, nanoparticles are readily functionalized. This means that a chemist’s choice of nanoparticle surface can generate very simple reactions that allow the chemist to anchor a variety of mol-
ecules on the particles’ surfaces. This anchoring gives the particles new chemical function. Such ease of functionalization then lends itself to aforementioned use in drug delivery or anti-cancer therapy. A given cell in vivo contains a number of proteins, the purpose of which is to bind complimentary proteins. Many uses of nanoparticles spawn from a singular concept: if the nanoparticle is functionalized with these complimentary proteins, the targeted cell will bind and accept atoms, ions and molecules from the nanoparticle carrier. By doing so, the cell will be effectively helping itself by the mechanisms put in place in the course of evolution. Before this technology can be widely used by medical practitioners, rigorous clinical trials must be completed in order to ensure the biocompatibility of the substance. These studies have until recently focused on manipulation of size, shape, roughness, surface chemistry and coating of the nanoparticles. Variations in this set of properties could transform a highly effective drug into a toxic, radioactive poison.(Nel et al.) The majority of in situ, pre-clinical trials have probed only these properties, but this may change due a recent report in Nature Nanotechnology which reports that such a set of considerations excludes another important side of the story—the cell cycle. A nanoparticle at work in the human body is taken up by a cell in which the particle takes action. The degree of this uptake is important to studies of toxicity. A recent report by Jong Ah Kim, et al. suggests that distinct stages of the cell cycle experience distinct nanoparticle uptake, the order of which (by concentration) is G2/M > S > G0/G1.(Kim et al.) The order is less important than the sensitivity of the nanoparticle dosage in vivo to the possibility of a cell being in any of the various cycle stages. Two possible approaches to this issue are to either make the nanoparticle selective for cells in a particular stage or tune all dosages to the stages with highest uptake volumes—G2 and M. Kim’s article serves as a reminder that to introduce new technology to biological systems is to attempt to predict the state of a perpetually dynamic environment subject to constant fluctuation. It is crucial to account for this dynamic environment in screening technologies. Story by Linda Le, a senior majoring in Biology, and Allister McGuire, a senior majoring in A.C.S. Chemistry.
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Faculty Profile: Matthew Panzer
Photos courtesy of Panzer Lab
The Panzer Lab in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering is doing groundbreaking research on materials for energy applications, such as supercapacitors and solar cells.
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rofessor Matthew Panzer knew for a long time what he would be when he grew up. After a seventh-grade survey pinned him as a future chemical engineer, his response was, “Sounds fun!” The Nebraska native, currently in his third year as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Tufts, grew up fascinated by how things work and, more specifically, by how they were made. These fascinations led him to the University of Delaware, where he studied chemical engineering with a minor in mathematics. “It was a ton of work,” he said. “It’s actually really fun to look back now and realize that, as an undergrad, I could get up early in the morning, go to classes, work all day, and then be productive late at night – how did I have all that energy?” While at the University of Delaware, Panzer got involved in research on campus and also spent a summer interning at Merck. As an intern, he quickly realized that all the engineers at Merck whom he admired had earned advanced degrees. “I knew I wanted to do a PhD,” he said. “I decided I liked it enough to do it for five years.” After graduating from Delaware, Panzer went straight to the University of Minnesota to get his PhD. He enjoyed being back in the Midwest, a little closer to home than where he had spent his undergraduate years. As a graduate student, Panzer conducted research in organic semiconductors – a field he was skeptical about
The goal of any universitylevel professor is to be both a teacher and a scholar. I love both aspects.
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after his experiences in an undergraduate course in electricity and magnetism. “It did not jive with me at all,” he admitted. However, as he soon found out, “It was really exciting stuff – your interests can change.” After earning his PhD in 2007, Panzer faced the difficult decision of what to do with his new degree. “Part of me wanted to go work for a while, save the world with a product, and then become a professor, say, when I was forty-five,” he mused. Still, he said, “I sort of knew I would end up teaching. I always knew that, deep down.” To help him decide between industry and academia, Panzer took up a postdoctoral position at MIT, where he began researching solar cells – a subject he would return to when he arrived at Tufts. One year later, Panzer was convinced that he would stay out of the industry and become a professor. In 2009 he began working here at Tufts, where he teaches a course in thermodynamics and process calculations for sophomore chemical engineering majors. He also teaches an upper-level course on colloids and a special-topics course on electronic devices for energy applications, which is closely tied to his research. Panzer is already well-recognized for his abilities as a teacher, and was named the 2011 Dr. Gerald R. Gill Professor of the Year as well as the 2011 Best Professor within the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He has also been recognized for his research, as he and his lab group were recently awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Clean
– Professor Matthew Panzer
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2011 Dr. Gerald R. Gill Professor of the Year successfully balances the lab and the classroom
laboratory processes for commercialization. Panzer envisions a use for these supercapacitors in hybrid cars, to quickly store the energy generated by the friction of braking and release it in quick bursts during acceleration. In addition to ionogel supercapacitors, Professor Panzer’s lab is also concerned with solar cells. Panzer noted a “commonality in device architecture” between the solar cells and the supercapacitors, as they both fall within the lab’s specialty of thin-film devices. Currently, solar cells are very expensive to make due to the high energy demand of silicon refinement and crystallization. Panzer’s research group is looking for alternative materials, and is currently examining organic films and metal oxides as hopeful candidates. Both of these are much cheaper to produce from monetary as well as energetic standpoints.
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Give yourself as many opportunities as possible, and then see what the universe opens up for you. Be open. Be ready for whatever.
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Energy Center for their work with ionogel supercapacitors. “In a nutshell,” Panzer explained, “what we do in my research group is advance materials for energy applications, specifically thin-film devices.” Capacitors are devices that store electrical energy, similar to batteries. However, while batteries store energy by means of a chemical reaction, capacitors store energy purely through separation of charges – a voltage is applied to two electrodes separated by an insulator, creating a positive charge on one electrode and a negative charge on the other. The capacitor stores these charges until the electrodes are connected to a circuit, which allows it to discharge. Capacitors cannot store as much energy as batteries, but can be charged and discharged much more rapidly, making them a useful complement to batteries. Professor Panzer’s supercapacitors are made from materials specially developed to maximize energy storage. To do this, Panzer has replaced the typical insulator that separates the electrodes with an electrolyte, which is a substance that promotes the separation of positive and negative charges without conducting true electrical current. Organic solvents have been used for this purpose in the past, but Panzer and his research group have replaced these with ionic liquids, which are essentially “liquid salts.” Unlike organic solvents, ionic liquids are not volatile or flammable, and are recyclable and very electrochemically stable. What’s more, ionic liquids can permit a larger voltage difference across the electrodes of a capacitor – and thus store more energy – than organic solvents. Despite these advantages over organic solvents, ionic liquids are still liquids and thus are prone to leaks or spills. To remedy this, Professor Panzer and his lab have been attempting to introduce a gel into the liquids. This supporting structure will allow the ionic liquids to behave like solids while still retaining their promising electrochemical properties. Panzer and company have developed two different methods for creating these “ionogels”: a polymerization chain-reaction performed within the ionic liquid to build a scaffold out of polymer chains, and a reaction using a silicon-containing organic precursor that creates a glass-like skeleton. While solidifying the liquids can reduce their conductivity, the results of Panzer’s experiments have been positive. “We’ve had some exciting results,” he explained, “that show that if you’re careful about what structural support you choose, you can actually maintain almost the same ionic conductivity as the pure liquid.” Panzer and his lab are currently working on combining these ionogels with the other important part of any capacitor – the electrodes. These too are unlike their counterparts in an ordinary capacitor. Panzer’s electrodes are made of carbon-based materials, not metals, and are very porous. This additional surface area allows the capacitor to store more charge. If experiments with these electrodes are promising, the group will be looking to scale up the
– Professor Matthew Panzer When asked about striking a balance between his duties as an instructor and a researcher, Panzer explained, “The goal of any university-level professor is to be both a teacher and a scholar. I love both aspects. There’s no formula to how I do it. You just do it, and then you do other things on top.” Some of Professor Panzer’s other responsibilities include a position on the Department’s Graduate Studies Committee and also a position as the Department’s Library Liaison. Outside the University, Professor Panzer enjoys playing tennis with other Tufts professors and is still involved in a karate club at MIT. He enjoys traveling as well, and has attended research conferences all over the United States. As a graduate student, he was also able to spend some time abroad in Germany and Japan. One of Professor Panzer’s favorite aspects of his job is the opportunity to mentor students. He advises flexibility, saying, “Give yourself as many opportunities as possible, and then see what the universe opens up for you. Be open. Be ready for whatever.” As for himself, Panzer is quite pleased with the opportunities he’s currently pursuing at Tufts. “I haven’t looked back,” he said with confidence. “I’ve definitely found my calling.” Story by Daniel McNeely, a junior majoring in Chemical Engineering and minoring in English.
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BOOK REVIEW:
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales D r. P was a well-respected music some of his most mysterious and outlandteacher and a gifted singer. It was in ish neurological cases. The cases are dihis classroom that his genius truly vided into four sections. The first, entitled came out. It was also in his classroom that “Losses”, presents maladies such as aphasia the bizarre incidents began. Dr. P could no (loss of speech) and agnosia (loss of knowllonger identify students by their faces but edge and cognition, like Dr. P). The second only by the sound of their voice. Walking in section, “Excesses,” challenges the medical the street, he began to see faces where there preconceptions of lesser-known conditions were none; he was patting water hydrants like hypermnesia, the antagonist of amand chatting with doorknobs (he was also nesia. “Transports” and “the World of the deeply shocked when they failed to re- Simple” are the last two sections and feature spond). The quirky and comical incidents equally astonishing cases, from alien limbs soon became a source of worry for Dr. P. to autistic artists. His befuddled optician referred him to a Sacks was born in 1933, in London, neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks. England. He earned his medical degree at Sacks found that Dr. P was unable to Oxford University and went on to work at see things as Mt. Zion a whole but Hospirather as a coltal in San lection of parts, F r a n of minute uncisco and connected deUCLA. tails lacking any Now livcorrespondence ing in to our reality. New York, The latter had he is Prono problem fessor of dealing with Neurology the abstract and Psy(like a game of chiatry at chess) but was Columbia deprived of all Univercognition when -The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and sity Mediit came to ma- Other Clinical Tales cal Center. terial visualizaSacks is the tion. He was author of unable to recognize faces and expressions; several books, his most famous including he had no sense of the “persona”. He had An Anthropologist on Mars and his most recertainly not lost any of his virtuosity, nor cent work entitled The Mind’s Eye. Awardwas he cognizant of his own condition, ed the Lewis Thomas prize, the Columbia which explained how Dr. P was able to University Artist, and frequently featured function in the real world, in his home, and in the New Yorker and various medical at the music school. journals, Sacks also holds honorary degrees It is with this curious case study that from several universities, including Tufts. Oliver Sacks introduces the first chapter of All of Sacks’ accounts are presented his work, The Man who Mistook his Wife for in a different tone. Some are purely comia Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Sacks’ book cal, like the case of the shy ninety-year-old is set as a personal, informal account of Natasha who suddenly contracts a certain
Walking in the street, he began to see faces where there were none; he was patting water hydrants and chatting with doorknobs (he was also deeply shocked when they failed to respond).
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Photo by Megan Berkowitz
“The Man Who Mistook his Wife For a Hat and Other Clinical Tales” was considered the most extraordinary books of Oliver Sacks, who New York Times calls “one of the great clinical writersers of the 20th century”
“friskiness” and interest in young men (the result of a neurosyphilis she contracted while working in a brothel). Other accounts, the more earnest and serious cases, are the ones that expose Sacks’ provocative and sensible analysis of human nature. These cases he describes as clinical “tales” because they are just that: tales, fables populated by heroes, victims, martyrs, and warriors, all embodied by the patient. There is a real investment and genuine care that Sacks makes evident in each tale. His stories are poetically scientific. His remarks thought provoking. Sacks puts into question what we really know, not only of neurology, but also of the human soul. Review by Alice Haouzi, a freshman majoring in Philosophy. Quotations taken from text of The Man Who MIstook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.
BOOK REVIEW:
Review of Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
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n his new book Connectome, MIT professor of Computational Neuroscience and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher Sebastian Seung describes the new technology and research that has led him to this conclusion. What is our connectome? It is the totality of connections between the neurons in a nervous system, much like the genome is the entire sequence of nucleotides in an individual’s
COURTESY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT PUBLISHING COMPANY
DNA. Many of today’s top neuroscientists, like Seung, have made it their goal to map the human connectome, but the vastness and complexity of our nervous system has been an obstacle. The brain has an immense number of connections. There are about one hundred billion neurons in the human brain, and each neuron has on average 7,000 connections to other neurons across gaps called synapses. The sheer volume of data required to create a three-dimensional map of the brain with high enough resolution to see all
of the synaptic connections would be impossible to process with today’s computers. Even a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, according to Seung, would require a petabyte of image data, demonstrating a need for machines strong enough to process all of the images required to map a connectome. Seung suggests, however, that the rate at which computer technology is developing might make it possible to construct such a map in the near future. Another obstacle that researchers like Seung are facing is the difficulty of obtaining quality images of the brain. The current method being used to map brains and nervous systems much smaller than ours – such as that of the C. elegans, a worm – is creating incredibly thin slices of the brain, scanning each slice with an electron microscope, and then stacking the scanned two-dimensional images to produce a three-dimensional image. In order to map the connectome, it is important to follow the path of each individual neuron throughout these slices. To accomplish this, researchers assign each neuron an individual color, turning the map of the human connectome into a three-dimensional coloring book. The electron microscope has enabled the imaging of synapses. Along with staining, it provides high enough resolution to see individual neurons. The electron microscope provides only two-dimensional images, making it necessary to examine many thin slices of the brain in order to get a full image of neurons. Cutting slices thin enough for imaging, however, requires an extraordinary knife. In order to produce these slices, a machine called a microtome is used. In a microtome, the pieces of tissue advance toward the knife in small steps, producing uniformly thin slices. Crystal knives are often used. These high-performance knives are typically only two nanometers wide with very fewimperfections, even on
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the atomic scale. This, however, is not new technology. Recently, the invention of the automated tape collecting ultramicrotome, ATUM for short, invented by Ken Hayworth, has made the process of producing thin enough slices to scan reliable. Two components of this machine have contributed to this advancement. First, the knife is mounted to the edge of a water trough, so the slices spread neatly onto the surface of the water rather than sticking to the knife. This innovation has made the collection process much easier. The ATUM also has the added element of a plastic tape apparatus, which ascends from the water’s surface like a conveyor belt. This eliminates the potential for human error, as the operator does not need to handle any slices manually. According to Seung, successfully mapping the human connectome would have widespread implications in the future. He suggests that it would allow scientist to create a new, more reliable map of the brain, specifying the function of regions. Until now, those studying the brain have had to rely on more archaic, scientifically unsound methods, similar to phrenology, to do so. A map of the human connectome could also allow psychiatrists to find the root cause of many psychiatric disorders, paving the way to cures and preventative measures to replace the current, inconsistent therapies used. More than anything, Sebastian Seung’s Connectome is a call to action. With the brain still a relatively unknown frontier in comparison to the rest of the human body, the advances in technology that Seung describes are providing future generations of scientists the opportunity to make new, groundbreaking discoveries. Review by Sonja Kytömaa, a freshman majoring in Biopsychology and Community Health.
A Bzzzness For Bees Why boosting honeybee immunity is good for both hive and harvester
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pring is here! The flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and the bees are…in a warehouse in the South End? For those of us who usually picture bees humming about the countryside, this may be a bit of a stretch. But for Dr. Noah Wilson-Rich this is the perfect staging ground for his quest to make honeybees into the best they can be(e). What started as a simple idea hatched in graduate school has developed into an innovative and thriving business that aims to answer today’s most pertinent beekeeping question: how do we keep honeybees from dying? Indeed, across the world—in both orchards and boardrooms— honeybees have been creating quite the buzz. Specifically, it’s their silence that has gotten people talking. Since 2006, honeybees worldwide have been succumbing to a phenomenon known as “colony collapse disorder.” While its causes are not fully known, its consequences are catastrophic. “Populations of honeybee hives just dramatically dro[p] in numbers over basically three days,” said Dr. Wilson-Rich, founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Best Bees CompanyTM. “You have tens of thousands—even over 80,000 bees—down to just a thousand. We don’t see dead bodies, they’re just gone.” Current theories point to new diseases (the varroa mite, a notorious bee parasite, often acts as the vector of transmission), poor nutrition, and pesticides. However, the devastating results of this condition reach far beyond the hive. The phrase “busy as a bee” is no understatement: in addition to honey and beeswax, honeybees pollinate over 130 types of crops—as well as other flowering plants—and each year produce at least $16 billion for the United States economy alone. “You can think of bees as an economic commodity,” said Dr. Wilson-Rich. “As the numbers of bees have gone down, the prices of these products have gone up.” The connection is clear: no bees, no honey, no money. This issue is not being taken lightly, and scientists, beekeepers, and economists alike are scrambling to remedy the situation. This is exactly where Dr. Wilson-Rich—and his warehouse full of bees— comes into play. “For whatever reason bees are dying, so what can we do to make them healthier?” said Dr. WilsonRich. While working on his PhD at Tufts University (his dissertation investigated the honeybee
immune system), he came up with a novel idea for how to make bees healthy. While other researchers focused on the causes of colony collapse disorder, Dr. Wilson-Rich turned his attention to novel ways of boosting honeybee immune systems. His idea uses pollen patties (food supplements made from pollen and water) as platforms for administrating honeybee-specific vaccines. These vaccines present bee cells with high doses of compounds isolated from microbial cell walls, thereby simulating an infection and triggering the honeybee’s natural defenses. If a bee actually gets infected later, its immune system is better prepared to control the situation, and limit honeybee disease and death. Seeing the potential of this technology— and its immense importance to the beekeeping community— Dr. Wilson-Rich (still a graduate student) turned
his idea into action and applied for the Dow Chemical Company Student Innovation Challenge in 2009. The competition gave young entrepreneurs from six universities 10 minutes and 5 slides to convince a panel of judges that their idea was the next breakthrough in business and technology. Not only was Dr. Wilson-Rich one of the ten winners from Tufts, he also walked away with $10,000 to start Best Bees CompanyTM. Initially, Best Bees started up in Dr. Wilson-Rich’s own apartment; other arrangements were quickly made though when several thousands of boxed bees were accidently placed—and forgotten—in his roommate’s room (said unsuspecting roommate was none too pleased). Today, Best Bees is in its third year of business and has conveniently set up residence, of all places, next to a flower shop in Boston’s South End. While the company’s primary objective remains honeybee health research, they have also expanded their model to include a fullservice beekeeping business. Aspiring beekeepers can purchase honeybee colonies from Best Bees (several thousand bees per shipment), and also receive year-round maintenance and harvesting services. The idea is to reach out to people who are interested in keeping a hive and provide them with a relatively low-cost introduction to beekeeping. “We wanted to focus on urban beekeeping in Boston, but it’s actually very hard to change peoples’ perspectives on bees,” said Dr. Wilson-Rich. “We get more interest from the suburbs, the countryside, the greater Boston area, and Cape Cod. This year we started selling in Main, so we’re basically expanding to include all of New England.” No research is conducted on these commercially sold bees, but the proceeds from this program directly fund bee health research, thereby keeping the company from depending on the capricious availability of research grants. With Best Bees set to keep expanding in the coming years—and with the threat to bee populations as present as ever—we can surely expect further innovation and successes from Dr. Wilson-Rich and his team. Want to learn more? Find out what all the buzz is about at www.bestbees.com. Story by Lucia Smith, a junior majoring in Biology.
Opinion:
The biological basis for our political views
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recent study conducted in the psychology department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has indicated that the long-standing conflict between liberals and conservatives has some biological basis. In other words, people who identify themselves as conservative think and act differently in certain situations than those who identify themselves as liberal. In this study, electrodes were attached to participants’ skin to monitor electrical changes, which indicated emotional reactions. Eyetracking equipment was also used to detect even the most sub-
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However, political tolerance could potentially be increased if everyone understood that our view of the world has some definitive biological basis.
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tle eye movements. Researchers found that liberals tended to spend more time looking at pleasant images, while conservatives tended to focus their attention on unpleasant images. This study further suggests that people are “pre-wired” to frame situations differently, meaning that they have innate tendencies. David Sears, a political psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “The way you frame a problem is to some extent dictated by what you think the problem is.” According to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln study, this is entirely accurate. For example, because liberals often view problems relating to national
security as less potentially threatening to national security, they tend to be less concerned with preventing them. Some previous research conducted in this area of political psychology agrees with the idea that liberals are focused on the “good” and conservatives are focused on the “bad.” New York University psychologist John Jost and his colleagues in 2003 compiled a meta-analysis of eighty-eight studies from twelve different countries conducted over a forty-year period. Based on these studies, they determined that conservatives tend to have higher needs to reduce uncertainty and threat. In some ways, this is a good thing, because limiting threat helps keep us safe. However, if someone becomes too concerned with preventing potential problems, he or she may neglect problems that already affect people on a daily basis, such as healthcare. I argue that this newfound knowledge should make us more open-minded when it comes to people’s political affiliations. We should welcome and accept others’ political views. This study further suggests that we should accept others’ beliefs, because their thoughts are partly based on their biological wiring. Of course, there are numerous social factors that affect our political affiliation as well. However, political tolerance could potentially be increased if everyone understood that our view of the world has some definitive biological basis. The next time you accuse someone of being a “right-wing fascist” or a “left- wing socialist,” consider that our brains are actually wired differently. Based on this new study, conservatives are innately more concerned with preventing potential threats, and liberals are innately more concerned with fixing the problems that are already present in society. Story by Emily Steliotes, a freshman double majoring in biochemistry and biotechnology
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Spinning Silk: A Freshman’s Perspective
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challenge you to find a student at Tufts who wants to be doing undergraduate research and hasn’t been able to find it,” a Tufts admissions officer said to a room full of prospective students in mid-February. “Go up to them! Ask them if they’re doing research, and if they’re not, ask them why. It’s a tough challenge to find someone who will say that he or she is not doing research because he or she couldn’t find it. It’s that easy to do research here.”
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE SAMMANN
Tess Torregrosa conducts undergraduate research in the Kaplan lab
Tess Torregrosa, a freshman majoring in chemical engineering, knows this fact firsthand. All it took was an email to Professor David Kaplan, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Tissue Engineering Resource Center. “I was surprised at how easy it was,” she says. Professor Kaplan’s research uses silk to make scaffolds that control stem cell differentiation. Artificial corneas, for example, can be created out of stem cells on these scaffolds. These corneas could be grown out of an individual’s own cells and used for cornea transplants instead of using those from an organ donor. This research is currently being tested in rabbits. Before the scaffolds can be built, however, the silk must be properly prepared. That’s where Tess comes in. The process starts with silk cocoons, which contain raw silk and a silkworm. Tess cuts open the cocoons and discards the worm, leaving only the silk. Silk is made up of two proteins: fibrin and sericin. Only the fibrin is used in the scaffold, so the next step is to remove the sericin. Tess explains that she does this by “cook[ing] it [the silk] in baking soda—it’s pretty cool!” After the silk is boiled in the baking soda, it is rinsed several times. “You pull it apart so it’s nice and fluffy like a cloud,” she says.
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PHOTO BY STEPHANIE SAMMANN
Tess Torregrosa holds a silk cocoon she works with.
Once the silk dries overnight, Tess dissolves the silk in a lithium bromide solution. This turns the silk into a liquid so that it can be molded into scaffolds. For each gram of silk, four milliliters of 9.3 M lithium bromide solution are needed. The solution is poured over the silk and placed in a heated oven for up to four hours. During this part of the process, Tess wears special gloves to protect against chemical burns. “Lithium bromide is not good, especially for your skin,” she explains. While Tess has enough lab experience to work alone when she feels comfortable doing so, her lab mentor Jelena texts her to make sure that everything is going smoothly, especially when it comes to the silk dissolution. “People are really friendly in the lab,” Tess says. After the solution is removed from the oven, Tess transfers the silk into cassettes. These devices resemble tape cassettes, but have a membrane down the middle. Once full, the cassettes are placed into a beaker filled with water and stirred on a stir plate for three days. The water is changed several times during this process. The final step is to “get the nasty stuff out,” as Tess jokingly explains. “Baked worm crumbles inside the silk sometimes, so you have to get it out.” This is done through a process called centrifugation. The dissolved silk is removed from the cassettes and placed into test tubes. The test tubes are then placed in a centrifuge, which rotates rapidly enough to separate substances of different densities. This removes any dirt and impurities (such as leftover worm) from the dissolved silk. This step is performed twice to ensure that the silk solution is as free from contaminants as possible. The concentration of the dissolved silk is then measured before it is stored in the refrigerator. While the process from start to finish can take quite a long time, Tess enjoys the slower pace. She says that it is less stressful than the lab component of a typical science course: everyone can come in on his or her own time, and she has more time to be methodical and clean with her work. Her favorite part of working in Professor Kaplan’s lab is the knowledge she’s gaining. “I’m doing it for myself to gain experience. It’s something I wouldn’t do at home, and it’s so easy to get involved.” Tess also enjoys the element of surprise of working in a real lab. One time, the red marker she used to label something turned the silk pink! “The whole thing is an experiment,” she explains. “They kind of give you guidelines, but you never really know.”
The whole thing is an experiment,” she explains. “They kind of give you guidelines, but you never really know. -Tess Torregrosa
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on Research at Tufts
Story by Ashley Hedberg, a freshman majoring in Computer Science.
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Amasia: The Next Supercontinent Recent geological research has revealed the likely location of the next supercontinent, Pangaea’s successor, which has been dubbed “Amasia.” According to Ross Mitchell, a geologist at Yale University, Amasia will form over the Arctic in 50-200 million years.1 He came upon this discovery by studying the magnetism of ancient rocks (paleomagnetism) to t r a c k their movements.2 According to his research, the Americas would first fuse together and then move northward until they collide with Eurasia near the North Pole. Australia would continue its northward movement, ending up near India and completing Amasia. Mitchell believes this reflects a greater pattern, a “supercontinent cycle” in which each successive supercontinent is centered 90 degrees from the previous one.3 At least two supercontinents have preceded Pangaea, which formed about 300 million years ago. Before Pangaea, the world’s landmasses were collected into Rodinia, which formed about a billion years ago and was in turn preceded by Nuna about two billion years ago.1 The supercontinent cycle is supported by the fact that Rodinia was centered 90 degrees from Nuna, Pangaea was centered 90 degrees from Rodinia, and Mitchell’s recent paleomagnetic data suggests that Amasia will be centered 90 degrees from Pangaea. Mitchell’s theory, called “orthoversion,” is contrary to previous theories, which have suggested that supercontinents rip apart and reform at about the same location (introversion), or that supercontinents rip apart and the continents migrate to the other side of the planet where they form another supercontinent (extroversion).2 We may not be around to walk on the next great supercontinent, but because of this research we can see millions of years into the future and imagine what the earth will look like in a distant time. Article by Sam Bashevkin, a sophomore majoring in biology.
Citations
Page 10: Life After Tufts [1.] UNOS Donate Life. 2012. United Network for Organ Sharing. 2 Feb 12 2012 <http://www.unos.org/donation/index.php?topic=organ_allocation> [2.] Transmedics. 2012. Transmedics, Inc. 2 Feb 2012. <www.transmedics.com> [3.] University Health Network. “Breathing Life Into Injured Lungs: World-first Technique Will Expand Lung Donor Organ Pool.” ScienceDaily, 19 Dec. 2008. Web accessed 2 Feb. 2012
Page 17: Political [1.] “Right-and left-wingers found to look at things differently--literally” University of Nebraska-Lincoln and World Science. Jan. 25, 2012. <http://www.worldscience.net/othernews/120125_eyes.htm> [2.] Groeger, L. “Political--or politicized?--psychology: Scientists combat the charge of ideological bias.” ScienceLine. Posted March 8, 2011. < http://scienceline. org/2011/03/political-—-or-politicized-—-psychology-2/
Page 11: Nanoparticles [1.] Chen, Zhuo. “Small-Molecule Delivery by Nanoparticles for Anticancer Therapy.” Trends in molecular medicine 16.12 (2010): 594-602. Print. [2.] Kim, Jong Ah, et al. “Role of Cell Cycle on the Cellular Uptake and Dilution of Nanoparticles in a Cell Population.” Nat Nano 7.1 (2012): 62-68. Print. [3.] Nel, Andre E., et al. “Understanding Biophysicochemical Interactions at the Nano-Bio Interface.” Nat Mater 8.7 (2009): 543-57. Print.
Page 19: Amasia [1.] Smith, K. (2012, February). Supercontinent Amasia to take North Pole position. Nature News. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/news/supercontinentamasia-to-take-north-pole-position-1.9996#/ref-link-1 [2.] Vykydal, J. (2012, February). Is ‘Amasia’ the Earth’s next supercontinent? The National Post. Retrieved from http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/09/is-amasia-the-earths-next-supercontinent/ [3.] Mitchell, R.N., Kilian T.M., Evans D.A.D. (2012). Supercontinent cycles and the calculation of absolute palaeolongitude in deep time. Nature. 482(7384), 208211 doi: 10.1038/nature10800
Page 14: Book Review: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales [1.] Saks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. Touchstone. 1998 Page 15: Book Review: Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [1.] Seung, S. Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade. 2012
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