Penn State Schuylkill Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program

After yesterday’s symposium, I, Ms. Mary Ann Smith as instructor for Schuylkill Small Worlds Tiny Earth, would like to offer a grand round of applause to our students who presented yesterday. Your work, especially given all the hardships that came this semester and not being in class to perform every test and see every tube, was still very professional and inspiring. I truly thank you for staying in the journey with me and putting on a very informative forum for the research. I know that it was difficult given our circumstances – who would have thought on top of everything the weather would still play a role in our ability to present. Yet, you all did an amazing job. I truly thank you.

As Dr. Medica, our campus’s DAA noted in the morning session, “Nice job all, thank you!”. Our campus’s Chancellor Dr. Jones remarked, “Very excited to be able to join you and learn from our students. Thank you!”

I would like to also take a moment to thank everyone who attended once again for participating in our event and letting us have a few moments to showcase the work going on.

Finally, I would like to take a moment on behalf of the student of the 2020 Small Worlds Tiny Earth course and myself to thank Dr. Medica and Chancellor Jones for allowing us the opportunity to participate in these programs. As students mentioned during the event, it provides a different experience of microbiology and helps to explain why microbiology is actually important to study. Thank you for supporting us.

Hopefully, next year, we’ll all be back to a semi-normal life and will be able to present in person.

Thank you to the Class of 2020 for all the memories.

Thank you to all the students, faculty, and staff who joined us for the first ever Small Worlds Tiny Earth Symposium. We thank you for your participation and hope that you learned something along the way.

Our live portion ended a bit earlier than we expected due to some technical issues along the way. We’re sorry if this posed any inconvenience to community members looking to join us. We do hope that you take a look at the symposium website and learn more about our program.

Our posters and presentations are available on the symposium website if you didn’t get the chance to join us. We look forward to commentary and even questions to keep the discussion going about antibiotic resistance and development. Hopefully, you’ll join us next year when we are back on campus.

Again, thank you.

Nervous. Excited. Crazily finishing projects.

All of the above describes us right now as we count down the hours until the symposium starts. We hope to see you tomorrow online for our First EVER Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program Symposium. It’ll be live on Zoom with students available from 10:30am – 2:30pm to answer questions about their research as well as having some students present their entire project. (Shh. There’s a special surprise for the students right around 12:30pm when our entire student group should be online).

Presentations have been loaded on their individual web pages with their scientific posters.

We look forward to presenting our antibiotic discovery research to you. We’re not letting COVID-19 stop our important work.

With only four days to the Symposium, we thought it was time to show some more pictures of us in lab. These pictures show a little of our fun side with the bacteria we are so proud of finding. We truly hope that you join us on April 30 from 10:30am – 2:30pm for our symposium. You can check out the symposium page. Materials will be posted early so that you can check out the student presentations and join us on Thursday with questions and a chance to meet the student researchers who have continued working even through a pandemic.

With one week to go, let’s take a look at the next stage of our research process. Last time, you saw pictures of our outside digging day. Next, we would like to share some pictures of our serial dilutions in the lab from that same Thursday class.

These are some in lab pictures from the morning section.

These are some pictures from our afternoon section.

 

As we are a little over a week away from the first ever Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program Symposium at PS Schuylkill, we are a bit excited and a bit nervous. (Okay, Ms. Smith is definitely both, but it’s almost game time.)

In order to spread the excitement, let us give you a preview of some of our first research day’s work. As a background, it was February 13, 2020. A wonderful Thursday in Central Pennsylvania – beautiful weather consisting of cold temperatures and of course, off and on rain showers. It truly was a perfect day for working outside in the rain.

These are pictures from the morning Micro Lab class.

These are pictures from the afternoon Micro lab.

Even though Penn State University has moved to remote education, we in the Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program are still moving our research ahead. Students have been working hard all semester and are getting ready to explain their projects to the world.

Join us on April 30, 2020, for our first annual Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program Student Symposium via Zoom. We have a page set up for student posters and presentations to view in advance of the symposium start and will have students available for questions during the hours of 10:30am to 2:30 pm. The meeting will be recorded, so that members who cannot join us at that time can still learn more about the student projects.

The link to the student posters and presentations is on our Symposium site.

Our Zoom link is provided here. Please Join Us and learn more about Antibiotic Discovery.

The past few years have been hot for the discovery of antibiotic producing bacteria. It isn’t just here at Penn State Schuylkill, but institutes around the world are doing similar work. Even though we just started in January 2020, we hope we can be soon adding our news about unique antibiotic producers to headlines everywhere.

This news article from NewsWeek discusses a major find – a bacteria that works against MRSA (otherwise known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) (Quinn and Dyson, Newsweek, 2019). This find is huge given how many people contract MRSA each year and can potentially suffer from its toxic effects. The microbe that researchers found is considered “Streptomyces-like” and has been named Streptomyces sp. myrophorea. What is so interesting about this find is where it was found, Ireland (and here we are mentioning it the day after St. Patrick’s Day). The region, according to the research team, was known for its healing properties and even has a connection back to the Druids, so it’s like a natural jump to find a special bacterial species in this area.

Check out the article here at NewsWeek: https://www.newsweek.com/antibiotic-resistance-superbug-ancient-soil-bacteria-ireland-streptomyces-1283324 and the original article at Frontiers in Microbiology (the pdf is also below to help you read more) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.02458/full.

A Novel Alkaliphilic Streptomyces Inhibits ESKAPE Pathogens

 

Well, that’s actually part of a much larger story (and if you’re truly interested, please contact Ms. Mary Ann Smith, our fearless leader here at mvs14@psu.edu). In short, Small Worlds Tiny Earth is our nod to the two programs that have led the crowd-sourcing efforts in antibiotic discovery.

The Small World Initiative started in 2012 at Yale University under the direction of Dr. Jo Handelsman. It was part of her “Microbes to Molecules” course, which acted as the pilot/model for what was to come. The course focused on finding new antibiotic producing bacteria and hopefully new antibiotic molecules to help make up for the lack of new discoveries. The course and the programs that developed use a crowd-sourcing model to have many scientists and scientists-in-training find environmental samples, grow bacterial specimens, and test the samples for potential antibiotic production.

During the early days, Dr. Handelsman went to work for the Obama Administration, but the Small World Initiative continued and expanded with the help of her former graduate students and post-docs. First, 30 schools joined in and by 2018-2019 school year, it was already over 300 participant schools. Ms. Smith was trained as a participant from another Pennsylvania school under the training lead, Dr. Nichole Broderick of the University of Connecticut. The Small World Initiative has held a close relationship with the American Society of Microbiology (ASM), who hosted the Small World symposium at their annual ASM Microbe meeting. You can learn more about the Small World Initiative at their website: http://www.smallworldinitiative.org/

The Tiny Earth Program grew out of the Small World Initiative shortly after Ms. Smith joined and is currently housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Discovery Center. The program formally began in Summer 2018. Dr. Handelsman has joined this aspect of the program and has worked to increase the efforts to not only find, but house the important potentially new bacteria that produce antibiotics. At Tiny Earth, there is a definite chemical characteristic aspect that was not present with the Small World Initiative. You can learn more about the Tiny Earth Program at their website: https://tinyearth.wisc.edu/

So, for us, Schuylkill Small Worlds Tiny Earth is an initiative at Penn State Schuylkill to incorporate antibiotic discovery into the microbiology lab, in order to provide students with the unique opportunity to discover an antibiotic producing bacteria. Students go out into nature, dig up soil, dilute and plate it to find bacteria that know how to protect themselves from their neighbors. We then spend the rest of the semester characterizing these bacteria, especially trying to find the other bacterial families that they can produce antibiotics against.

If you check out our adjoining pages, you can see the work of each cohort of students.

We appreciate you taking the time to visit and hope you learn lots about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance as you continue reading.

Welcome to Schuylkill Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program (SWTEP).

We hunt for antibiotic producing bacteria in the soil, in an effort to discover new antibiotics. We also use our knowledge to spread the word about antibiotic resistance and hope our efforts help to fight it. All researchers in the program are students (lead by one wonderful fearless instructor) and we are full of Penn State Schuylkill Pride.

Come follow us on our journey. We hope you learn something along the way.

Check out our Student Cohort page links on our About Us site.