Random Ramblings - Research

My research is done for the day, except for needing to start an overnight culture of Streptococcus pyogenes, so I thought I'd take some time to blog a bit. I've mentioned in the past that I am a graduate student of biomolecular chemistry, but I've never really mentioned what I do. So, if you care: I'm gonna tell you. If you don't: wait for my next blog or video upload. I'll do my best not make it boring.

I work on something called riboswitches. Now if we break that down, what we get is: ribonucleic acid + switch = RNA switch. And it is what it sounds like: a switch that is made of RNA which turns gene expression on or off. It's a very simple mechanism and requires very little materials, hence it's a good system to be used by small organisms that don't have a whole lot of life materials to spare (i.e. bacteria). There are plenty of these guys in nature. They usually respond to things like nucleic acids, amino acids, or other life-essential molecules.

However, scientists have become experts at using things found in nature and molding them to their own benefit. So what we do in our lab is attempt to make riboswitches that respond to molecules we like (or don't like).

But what good is that? Well, think of these as applications:

A bacterium that seeks out pesticides in soil, and when it finds the pesticide, an ezyme is expressed that can break down that pesticide, leaving clean soil!

A synthetic cell that can be injected into a diabetic patient so that when it detects high amounts of blood sugar, they pump out insulin. No more insulin shots!

A sythetic cells that seeks out molecules secreted by cancer cells, and pumps out medication to selectively kill the cancer cell.


Now obviously, these are things that will take years to develop. But everyone in science does their part to build up to these great inventions. So I work on putting these switches into pathogenic bacteria. With my particular project, people who work with pathogenic bacteria will be able to turn genes on and off to determine which genes are essential for pathogenesis (the process used by bacteria to invade another organism). The better we understand the genes involved in infecting (people
for example), the better we can treat infections. In the picture to the left, you can see where I have turned on gene expression (left) versus expression being off (right) in response to the presence of theophylline, a caffeine derivative. The section on the bottom of both plates contains strains of bacteria that always express the enzyme that makes the cells blue (called a positive control).

So I hope this hasn't been a complete snooze fest for you. I didn't want to go too in depth. I was going for an overview, so that people know in general what a biomolecular chemist does. Who knows, maybe one of you will want to become one (or are becoming one) one day!

That's it for now, and don't forget to keep checking out my youtube channel for more cooking tutorials, beauty how-tos, and product reviews!

TTFN