August 30, 2007

2007 NSLS Summer Student Wrap-up

Seventeen high school and college students performed summer research projects at the NSLS this year, working with scientists and engineers from the department in research fields ranging from medical sciences to electrical and mechanical engineering. In addition to their research projects, students had the opportunity to attend scientific lectures, tour Brookhaven’s research facilities, and participate in numerous social activities.

Interested students apply to these programs in the spring, and the programs range from six to 10 weeks long. More information and application procedures can be found on Brookhaven’s Office of Educational Programs website.

Here’s an idea of what this year’s students did this summer:

NSLS Summer Students

Susan Abedi is a junior at Brentwood High School. With new and more powerful x-ray sources being developed, structural biology is once again at the mercy of radiation damage. Susan’s goal at the NSLS this summer was to study the effects of radiation damage on protein crystals that she crystallized in the laboratory. She varied several parameters such as protein concentration and pH. The protein she concentrated on was lysozyme but she hopes to extend her studies to other proteins in the future.

Students Derrek Anderson and Jamel Gray and Professor E. H. Shaban are from Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA. They worked with Peter Siddons at the NSLS as part of the Faculty and Student Team program to develop a MICROMESH GAS (MICROMEGAS)-based fluorescence detector to be used for dilute samples in EXAFS. The MICROEMGAS is fabricated by the microelectronics laboratory of Brookhaven’s Instrumentation Division. The new detector is expected to be rigid, immune to microphonic vibrations, and have an improved signal to noise ratio as compared to conventional detectors.

Jacquelyn Cafasso is an undergraduate student at Cornell University majoring in biology. She worked at the NSLS this summer with Babu Manjasetty and Mark Chance of the Case Center for Synchrotron Biosciences as a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) student. They studied an archaeal transcription regulator of the tryptophan biosynthetic pathway known as TrpY. TrpY is a repressor that blocks RNA polymerase access to the site of transcription initiation and prevents TATA box binding protein from binding to the TATA box sequence. Although its function is the same as the TrpR repressor in E. coli, TrpY shares very little sequence homology with TrpR and is predicted to have an ACT (amino acid binding) domain not present in TrpR. This implies that archaeal TrpY acts by a different mechanism than E. coli TrpR. Crystallographic studies were undertaken to gain insight into the structure-function relationship of the TrpY repressor as well as important features of transcription regulation in the Archaea. This research was done in collaboration with the Department of Microbiology at The Ohio State University.

Terrell Johnson is a graduate of Hampton University, entering his first year of graduate school at the University of Maryland in electrical engineering. This summer, he was a GEM Fellow, supported by Brookhaven through the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc. Under Peter Siddons at the NSLS, he completed an electrostatic profile for an ionization chamber and beginning stages of improving circuit output for the NSLS-Avalanche Photodiode Detector Amplifier. The chamber is an enclosed area in which a gas (noble) is ionized by the x-ray beam, and these newly charged particles are detected and used to determine position measurements. He used Vector Fields Opera Tosca 3D software for the electric field analysis. He also worked on a project that will reduce the noise and count clusters of packets of light in the NSLS Avalanche Photodiode Detector Amplifier. The amplifier is an APD connected to a cascade of operational amplifiers, with very fast rise times (around 100 ps).

Michael Luke is a junior at Ward Melville High School. He worked with Lin Yang at the NSLS this summer to test and troubleshoot a liquid handling system. The operation cycle of the existing Gilson liquid handler involves only one sample storage loop. As a result, the liquid handler is idle while the sample is being measured. The new liquid handling system features two sample loops. Therefore, the second sample loop can be loaded while the sample from the first loop is being measured, thus improving the overall throughput of the system.

Maria Michta is a senior majoring in biology, with a minor in chemistry, at CW Post LIU. She came to Brookhaven to continue work on her undergraduate thesis, which is the study of the antiviral properties of Dabco-hydrocarbon modified cloths. She worked this summer under the guidance of Vivian Stojanoff. She used x-ray absorption spectroscopy to study the structure of the Dabco-hydrocarbon modifications in hopes of understanding what structural properties correlate with improved viral removal. Understanding structurally why one modification is successful vs. another will better enable researchers to create novel antimicrobial products such as antiviral/antibacterial bandages. In the future, Maria would like to pursue a graduate career in microbiology.

John Mortensen is a senior at Garden City High School. As part of the High School Research Program, John worked at the NSLS this summer under the guidance of Lisa Miller and graduate student Andreana Leskovjan. He studied metal binding to the amyloid protein within Alzheimer's brain tissue using x-ray fluorescence microprobe at beamline X27A. He imaged plaques before and after adding EDTA, a metal chelating agent, in order to see if chelation can remove metal from Alzheimer’s plaques, thus being a potential treatment method for the disease.

Obafemi Otelaja is a senior at Howard University. He worked with Lin Yang at the NSLS this summer to develop improved humidity control for the study of lipid membranes. Currently existing humidity control suffers from the short lifetime and poor repeatability of the polymer-based humidity sensor. Femi helped to design a humidity generator and integrate it together with a commercial chilled mirror dew-point sensor to provide accurate and repeatable humidity environment for lipid membrane samples.

Erica Palma is an incoming freshman at Stony Brook University as a part of the Women in Science and Engineering program. This summer, she worked with Syed Khalid as part of the High School Summer Research Program. She spent her time at the NSLS researching zeolites. These microporous crystalline solids are important catalysts commonly used in the petroleum industry. Through the use of EXAFS, she was able to find the coordination number of copper in copper-exchanged zeolites calcined at different temperatures, and used this information to distribute copper cations between two of its preferred sites.

Simone Park is a junior at Stony Brook University majoring in physics. She is interested in becoming a biophysicist to continue investigating biological processes such as diseases and plant physiology with the aid of physical tools. This summer, she worked as a SULI student under Lisa Miller at the NSLS. She also collaborated with Chang Jun Liu of Brookhaven’s Biology Department to develop a high-throughput method of screening mutant Arabidopsis thaliana plants using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. In line with the nation’s quest to develop alternative fuels, degrading excess lignocellulosic biomass into ethanol can be a good alternative. One way to degrade lignocelluloses is to modify specific genes in the plant that hinder their breakdown. This project aims to find mutants that are deficient in acylesterases and acyltransferases, enzymes that help to maintain the recalcitrance of cell walls. By experimenting with sample preparation and by interpreting FTIR’s specific information, Simone hopes to reveal a method that will efficiently screen mutants that are good candidates for use in bioethanol production.

Leanne Piscitelli is a junior majoring in biochemistry at Stony Brook University. She began working at the NSLS with Vivian Stojanoff and the beamline X6A team in January 2007. During the summer, she was a student intern funded by the Battelle Program. The main focus of her project was on the effects of magnetic fields and divalent cations on the internal order and quality of lysozyme crystals. Previous studies have shown that magnetic fields improve the internal structure of the crystals. Many divalent cations are paramagnetic, meaning that they are attracted to magnetic fields. By using these to crystallize the proteins, Leanne expected to see an increase in the effects of the magnetic field on the crystals.

Glenn Werneburg is a sophomore majoring in biochemistry at Stony Brook University. He participated in the SULI program under the mentorship of Marc Allaire at the NSLS. His project involved the expression, purification, and crystallization of the core protein of the Hepatitis C virus (HCV). The project – determining its viral structure using x-ray diffraction crystallography – would be a huge step toward curing HCV, the world’s second most fatal virus.

Richard Wright is a graduate of Hampton University and currently pursuing a master’s degree in electronics engineering at Norfolk State University. As a Co-op Engineer at the NSLS, he worked with Anthony Caracappa in the Controls and Diagnostics Group to support the upgrade of the Synchronization System. The Synchronization System is used to insure proper timing of the devices required for injection of both the XRAY and VUV rings. In support of this project, some of Richard’s duties included predicting the response of a proposed filter design using basic engineering analysis methods and building a LabVIEW virtual instrument for comparison and testing. He constructed and tested prototype circuitry. Through this effort, much of the existing noise will be reduced when the upgrade is in place. In addition, a greater focus on this system upgrade is replacing the old timing circuitry with a modern-day Altera Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. Using Altera’s Quartus II design software, Richard made modifications to a pre-existing design and created new design modules in Verilog code or schematic entry.

Christina Zayas is a freshman majoring in physics at Stony Brook University. She decided to follow an internship in her spring semester at the NSLS in the hopes to explore different applications and career opportunities in physics. During the summer, she worked at beamline X15B under the direction of Paul Northrup and Vivian Stojanoff, collecting and analyzing absorption data for various proteins containing metal centers. Her primary objective was to establish the local environment of the absorbing atom in order to determine how electrons are transferred during the catalytic action of different enzymes. In the future, Christina aspires to continue her research in x-ray absorption spectroscopy and pursue graduate study in applied physics or materials science.

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ARTICLE BY: Kendra Snyder