Researcher Spotlight
Jennifer Rocca
Research Assistant, Josephine Bay Paul Center
This fall, while most people were avoiding Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, MBL research assistant Jennifer Rocca was just arriving. The reason? An unprecedented opportunity to study water-bourne human pathogens that scientists believe can flourish after a major flood.
“After the levees broke and a major section of New Orleans was flooded, the Army Corps of Engineers pumped out about 95 billion liters of polluted runoff from the city’s streets into Lake Pontchartrain, a large lake north and east of the city,” says Rocca. The city’s canals also filled with the runoff.
Knowing that these were ideal living conditions for a variety of potentially serious microscopic human health threats, Jenny’s supervisor, Linda Amaral Zettler, moved quickly to propose a collaboration among the Centers for Oceans and Human Health (COHH) and Louisiana State University (LSU) at Baton Rouge to screen for especially threatening microbes (including E. coli, Enterococcus, Vibrio, and Staphylococcus) and to identify all of the microbes living in the runoff-fed areas.
The proposal went through and Jenny, a botanist who has worked at the MBL for the past year, was dispatched to LSU to help coordinate the collection and processing of samples from several sites along the 17th Street Canal and the Industrial Canal in downtown New Orleans. COHH collaborators also collected samples from Lake Pontchartrain.
After a week in the field, Jenny returned to the MBL with more than 50 microbe samples, which Bay Paul Center scientists are currently analyzing. When the analysis is complete, they will share their findings at a scientific meeting.
What was the experience like for Jenny? From a scientific standpoint, she says it was exciting because no one has ever studied the aftermath of a flood in an urban area before. “And I’ve learned that collaboration can be difficult but rewarding over the long haul,” she says.
The trip was personally moving as well. “In Baton Rouge, which is about 70 miles from New Orleans, you could feel the chaos of the hurricane aftermath. There were I don’t know how many thousands of extra people living there who had fled the city,” Jenny says. She also saw the devastation firsthand while collecting samples in downtown New Orleans. “It was as awful as the news reports said it was. But it was good to be able to fly down there and see it. It reminded me that I don’t have anything in my life to complain about.”
*COHH partners participating in this collaboration include the MBL, MIT, and WHOI locally, as well as the University of Miami and the University of Hawaii. Funding for the project is from an NSF Exploratory Research Grant. |
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Research Briefs
From the Furie Laboratory
Publication:
Brown, M.A., G.S. Begley, E. Czerwiec, L.M. Stenberg, M. Jacobs, D.E. Kalume, P. Roepstorff, J. Stenflo, B.C. Furie, and B. Furie. 2005. Precursors of novel Gla-containing conotoxins contain a carboxy-terminal recognition site that directs gamma-carboxylation. Biochemistry 44: 9150–9159.
From the Bay Paul Center
The Bay Paul Center will present Discover the Microbial World Within!, a three-day enhancement workshop for high school and undergraduate teachers, on March 9-12. Teachers will learn about the diverse ways that bacteria evolve and symbiotically interact with insects. The workshop is supported by the National Science Foundation and the NASA Astrobiology Institute. All participation costs for qualified teachers are covered. For more information, contact Bay Paul Center Assistant Scientist Seth Bordenstein sbordenstein@mbl.edu or visit http://jbpc.mbl.edu/microbial-workshop-2005.html.
Bay Paul Center Publications:
Bordenstein, S.R. and R.B. Rosengaus. Discovery of a novel Wolbachia supergroup in Isoptera. Current Microbiology 51: 393-398.
Casiraghi M., S.R. Bordenstein, L. Baldo, N. Lo, T. Beninati, J.J. Wernegreen, J.H. Werren, and C. Bandi. Phylogeny of Wolbachia based on gltA, groEL and ftsZ gene sequences: clustering of arthropod and nematode symbionts in the F supergroup and evidence for further diversity in the Wolbachia tree. Microbiology 151: 4015-4022.
Baldo, L., S.R. Bordenstein, J.J. Wernegreen, and J.H. Werren. Widespread recombination throughout Wolbachia genomes. Molecular Biology and Evolution 23: 437-449.
From the Program in Molecular Physiology
Publications:
Osbourn, D., R.H. Sanger, and P.J.S. Smith. 2005. Determination of single cell oxygen consumption with impedance feedback for control of sample-probe separation. Anal Chem 77, 6999-7004.
Pethig, R., L. Jakubek, R.H. Sanger, E. Heart, E. Corson, and P.J.S. Smith. 2005. Electrokinetic measurements of membrane capacitance and conductance for pancreatic b-cells. IEE Proc. Nanobiotechnology 152: 189-193.
Smith, P.J.S., R.S. Sanger, and M.A. Messerli. Principles, Development and Applications of Self-Referencing Electrochemical Microelectrodes to the Determination of Fluxes at Cell Membranes. In: Methods and New Frontiers in Neuroscience. Adrian C. Michael, Editor. CRC Press. In Press.
Messerli, M.A., K.R. Robinson, and P.J.S. Smith. Electrochemical sensor applications to the study of molecular physiology and analyte flux in plants. In: Plant Electrophysiology – Theory and Methods. Alexander G. Volkov, Editor Springer. In Press
Smith, P.J.S. and D. Remsen. Using Pharmabase to Perform Pharmacological Analyses of Cell Function. In: Current Protocols in Bioinformatics. A. Baxevanis, D. Davison, R. Page, G. Petsko, G. Stormo, and L. Stein, Editors. John Wiley and Sons. In Press. |
