ACM Student Researchers Use Electron Microscope at UMBC to View Phages

CUMBERLAND, Md. (Dec. 15, 2023)– Allegany College of Maryland (ACM) student researchers Felicity Grady, Elizabeth Honsaker, Daniel Pressman, Elizabeth Schramm and Catherine Simpson traveled to UMBC’s Keith R. Porter Imaging Facility on November 15. The five students brought a cooler of four fresh bacteriophage (phage) lysates samples and were joined by ACM Professors Michèle Barmoy and Steve Heninger.  
 
Students used the Porter Imaging Facility’s Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) to get their first glimpse of their phages.  
 
Tagide deCarvalho, who manages UMBC’s Porter Imaging Facility, showed the students how to prepare samples for the lab’s TEM, a Hitachi HT7800 120 kV TEM with an AMT Nanosprint15 B digital camera. Students mounted their phages on small copper grids and coated them with Uranium acetate. When placed in the TEM, a beam of electrons was transmitted through their phages. deCavralho and the student located intact phages and photographed them using the TEM’s digital camera. Digital files of the images were shared with the students and became part of their research. 

Four of the students extracted enough DNA from their phages this semester to have them sequenced by the University of Pittsburgh over winter break.  

In the spring semester, students will annotate (identify the genes and their functions) the sequenced DNA using bioinformatics (the use of computer software and scientific methodology to understand data).

• Those results are submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information GenBank database to determine if a yet-undiscovered phage has been found.
• If the submission is a new phage, the discoverer has the chance to choose the bacteriophage’s name.
• At the end of the spring semester, one ACM student and a faculty member present their work at the annual National SEA-PHAGES Symposium. Students can also present their results at the annual Maryland STEM Conference.

 

UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) is Allegany College of Maryland’s buddy school in the SEA-PHAGES (Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science) program. ACM became a SEA-PHAGES institution in 2019 and 59 students have been part of the college’s PhageHunters program.  

SEA-PHAGES program is a two-semester, discovery-based undergraduate research course that that begins with students digging in the soil to find new viruses but progresses through a variety of microbiology techniques and eventually to complex genome annotation and bioinformatic analyses. It is jointly administered by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science Education division and Graham Hatfull’s Lab within the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. 

More information about Allegany College of Maryland’s PhageHunters program is available at www.allegany.edu/phagehunters.