Undergraduate Eliza Klos has already crafted a sturdy foundation to flourish as a physician. 

One of Klos’ first pivotal steps when she got to Binghamton University was declaring a major in neuroscience — an interesting choice for a pre-health student. Klos said she sought a concentration that would allow her to learn about people holistically. 

“I wanted something that was going to be different,” says Klos, a member of the class of 2024. “I like that (neuroscience) is interdisciplinary and it involves more than just biology. It has more of a human-basis so it’s been a really good fit for me so far.”

The next step Klos took was getting involved in research early — even before getting into college.  Klos grew up in Buffalo, which is where she discovered her passion for helping others. Through a high school summer program at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Institute, Klos was able to gain her first taste of what it would mean to be a physician and a researcher. She was given an independent project where she examined a type of cancer called mantle cell lymphoma, which targets the lymphatic system. 

“The summer before my senior year, I worked in a lymphoma and myeloma cancer research lab,” Klos recalls. “My research focused on examining a potential mechanism for resistance of the cancer to chemotherapy drugs. If the pathway can be discovered, it could be targeted with drugs, hopefully eliminating the problem of resistance.”

As a First-Year Research Immersion Program (FRI) participant and a member of Binghamton University’s Scholars Program, Klos has had plenty of research experiences since then. For FRI, her project focused on creating a novel model of the effect coronavirus-related stress had on children. Their chosen schematic? Rats.

“This was the first time this project was done in the neuroscience stream,” Klos says. “Really we were trying to find a way to model what that kind of stress that came for kids during the time of COVID-19 would look like in rats. So that involved socially isolating the rats for short periods of time and then analyzing both their behavior and their neurochemistry.” 

Following her last semester in FRI, Klos knew she wanted to continue doing research, so she emailed several professors with similar interests. That’s how she landed her next research opportunity as an undergraduate research assistant in Assistant Professor Laura Cook’s biology lab. 

The lab’s main focus is on streptococcus A, the bacteria that may cause strep throat symptoms in some patients, but not in others. It’s important to understand differences between bacteria that require treatment and those that don’t. As a means to deter the onset of antibiotic resistance, physicians need to be able to narrow down whether certain patients need to be prescribed antibiotics, even despite their strep tests coming back positive.

Within the Cook lab, Klos is something of a head researcher, helping with the organization of the lab’s undergraduates, training them and keeping Cook informed on their progress. According to Cook, she’s also in charge of collecting samples, testing them, reporting all the data and forming training initiatives. 

“She’s a leader, both socially and scientifically,” Cook says. “We had some issues with contamination, especially with all of the new workers, but she’s been helping us troubleshoot that. She streamlined the undergraduates and their processes, taught them sterile technique and suggested training. She always goes above and beyond!”

Klos serves as the vice president of the American Medical Women’s Association on campus. It’s an organization devoted to advancing women and others in medical careers. 

“It’s really meant for anyone who has an interest in medicine, whether they’re hoping to go into medicine or just find it interesting,” Klos says. “We try to be open to everyone.”

Klos’ antibiotics research did not stop in the Cook lab. As a university scholar, she had access to the Guthrie Scholars Premedical Internship, where besides helping with research, she also had the chance to shadow different doctors and present a research lecture before a panel. Her main focus for the lecture was her collaboration with an orthopedic surgeon, studying the necessity of antibiotics among elective foot and ankle surgery patients.

“One of my favorite things [about research] has been communicating it to other people,” Klos says. “I’ve done quite a few presentations and a pretty big research lecture at Guthrie, and it’s very exciting to share the research I’ve been working on. I’m very proud of all of it and it’s so nice to get positive feedback and bounce ideas off of different people who are even more knowledgeable than I am.”

While she isn’t set on any one medical career yet, Klos knows medical school is her next step following graduation. Anesthesiology has been the most interesting focus for her, given the personable nature of the position.

“Being an anesthesiologist involves talking with patients at a high-stress time for them, so you have to focus on making sure patients are comfortable,” Klos says. “It’s been one of my favorite specialties so far, but I still have more to explore.”

“What I would do, and I thought it was research, is to Google the terms that I hear on TV,” Soliman says. “And when I did that, the first result that you will get is Wikipedia. So I’d get into Wikipedia, and I got a small notebook. … And I would copy and paste, write down definitions.”

Soliman, a Fulbright scholar and graduate student in biological sciences at Binghamton, has been a researcher ever since. An evolutionary biologist interested in the formation of new and distinct species in Mimulus plants, Soliman studied biotechnology and molecular biology as an undergraduate at Cairo University.

Also known as monkeyflowers because some of its species have flowers resembling a monkey’s face, plants from the genus Mimulus are one of the model organisms used to study evolution.

In trying to answer how different Mimulus plant species are formed, Soliman and her colleagues complete basic plant care such as watering, repotting and fertilizing. Next, they conduct artificial crosses, where they move pollen from one plant to the female parts of another plant. This enables them to explore the reproductive isolation of the two plant species. They also study how much the hybrid seeds produced from those crosses suffer from reduction in fitness compared to their parents. This can help in understanding how separate species are created and maintained over time.

While she’s acclimated now, when Soliman began her master’s program in the fall, her new environment introduced a multitude of obstacles.

“Whenever I thought of my family, I would immediately cry,” she says. “And then I would think, no, I’m not sad. I’m just homesick. But you miss the food, you miss the family. You miss whatever activities you all used to do.”

Soliman eventually found ways to maintain that close connection with her family, making being away from them much easier to manage.

The close relationship Soliman has with her family extends to her education. Due to family influence and cultural norms, she neglected some of the subjects she initially wanted to study.

“In Egypt, astronomy is not a field that will bring you money and food on the table,” Soliman says. “You have to work in the medical field to get money. Because people care about medicine.”

Considering multiple fields chosen through culture and family influence, even researching evolution was risky for Soliman. Still, during her senior year of college, she took an evolutionary genetics course. At that moment, she knew no other topic piqued her interest like this one.

“I started to see in color, like everything before was black and white. Before, I didn’t pay attention, I just did the work to get my A plus,” Soliman says. “But this is when I began bothering and nagging my professor with constant questions.”

As she grew determined to study evolution, Soliman spoke with her professors and learned of the Fulbright scholars program from a chemistry teacher at her school.

This determination to understand more has also translated into Soliman’s work ethic as a researcher at Binghamton. James Sobel, an associate professor of biological sciences and Soliman’s mentor, describes her as unique.

“She is the kind of person who asks questions constantly. She has this drive to know things and a curiosity that is overwhelming,” Sobel says. “That is the only thing I can’t teach a student — or at least I haven’t figured out how to — that intrinsic motivation. It’s one of those things that some students develop, but as a graduate student you either have it or you don’t.”

After completing graduate school in the spring of 2022, Soliman plans to teach at her alma mater. She ultimately wants to continue her research in evolution and obtain a doctorate in the United States.

“Pursue your dreams and do whatever you like even if it’s against the odds,” Soliman says. “Just do the hard work, and everything will come to you.”

Even though the Johnson City resident will be focusing on geology with an emphasis on saltwater intrusion on aquifers and groundwater, it was her experience as an independent study student in the lab of Weixing Zhu, professor of biological sciences at Binghamton, that helped her discover her love of research.

She joined his lab in the summer of 2019 and has been working with doctoral student Vashti Mahadeo to collect, sort and identify ground arthropods (beetles, spring tails, mites and spiders) to compare biodiversity in urban and rural riparian (forested or wooded lands adjacent to a body of water) zones.

“She’s not even a biology major, but my work together with her interest in ecology overlap,” Mahadeo says. “She brings her geology background in and it meshes well.”

During the winter, Sprague-Getsy examined soil samples from these zones for pH and conductivity. She collected them with Mahadeo last summer. “She is almost like a graduate student in my lab because she is so highly dependable,” Zhu says.

“I’ve gotten so much out of the experience, from learning how to read papers to presenting research,” Sprague-Getsy says. “I get treated as an equal by Dr. Zhu and Vashti even though I’m an undergraduate student. I’ve really appreciated that and it has helped build my confidence.”

She presented her research on the biodiversity of coleoptera (beetles) in urban and rural riparian zones during the Illinois TRIO McNair Virtual Symposium in July 2020. Federal TRIO programs are educational opportunity outreach programs designed to motivate and support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Sprague-Getsy was accepted into the competitive Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program in 2020, which provides research opportunities to disadvantaged undergraduate students with strong academic potential in preparation for doctoral studies.

During her Binghamton career, Sprague-Getsy has also been a student research collaborator at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a Binghamton University Acres farm intern, and a tutor and TRIO mentor through Student Support Services. She also completed an independent study under the supervision of Joseph Graney, professor of geological sciences and environmental studies, where she and another student tested the impacts of road salt and the combustion of wood chips at the campus heating plant and the resulting atmospheric emission of wood fly ash on the soils on and adjacent to the campus.

Zhu says he’s proud to be part of Sprague-Getsy’s success.

“She has used Binghamton University to its full advantage of what we can offer, and my lab is just one example,” he says. “If you look at her résumé, she is really engaged in different activities, particularly as a mentor. She’s a role model and an example, and she is exceptional at using the resources available to her to achieve a goal.”

Gabriella Quartuccia won a $1,000 Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Fund research grant for her project, “Genomic variation in a species complex of ecologically important ants.”

The seed money supports researchers focused on wildlife conservation or related fields of North American fauna. Quartuccia will use the funding to support her dissertation fieldwork this summer, when she plans to collect five worker ants from 30 different colonies in 10 northeastern deciduous forests.

She studies population-level genetic variation in the lab of Thomas Powell, assistant professor of biology. His research focuses on understanding the origin and maintenance of biodiversity — specifically plant-feeding insects and how environmental changes affect evolutionary responses leading to speciation, the evolutionary process where populations evolve to become distinct species, and adaptation.

“One of the things that Gabby is doing well as an innovative young researcher and biologist is blurring the lines between biological processes at ecological and evolutionary scales,” Powell says. “Gabby’s dissertation work is moving us towards a more nuanced understanding of how new species form and how newly formed diversity plays out in ecosystems.”

Quartuccia was a natural fit for Powell’s lab based on her experience and interests in evolutionary genetics and speciation biology. As an undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo, she examined the evolution of brown, black and polar bears using computer modeling. After graduating with a biological sciences degree in 2016, she worked as a veterinary assistant and research technician in a cardiometabolic genomics lab.

Researching ants was not on Quartuccia’s radar until she joined Powell’s lab. Several wildflower seed-dispersing ants in the genus Aphaenogaster are closely related genetically and so similar in appearance that the boundaries between “species” are often unclear. These ants are responsible for up to 74% of ant-mediated seed dispersal events in the northeastern United States, which means they help shape ecological outcomes of deciduous forests. Add in climate change, deforestation and other human interference, and there are a lot of potential reasons why these ants may be in a state of “incomplete speciation.”

“They were a system that Tom had known about and had questions about in the back of his mind, and so he posed the system to me,” Quartuccia says. “I ran with it because it hits all of the things that I’m interested in. It just kind of fell into my lap, and I’ve grown to love working with ants.”

The Manhattan native had not conducted any fieldwork before she arrived at Binghamton three years ago. Her first day in the field came with a tick bite and a steep learning curve.

“She is a city girl at heart and had some initial trepidation about going out in the woods, but now she’s doing all this ant research by herself in state forests several hours away,” Powell says. “She’s really grown as a natural historian and field biologist, and is doing an amazing job.”

Quartuccia is not sure yet whether she wants to focus on research, teaching or both once she completes her degree, but she does know that she wants to work somewhere she can inspire the next generation of scientists, especially women.

“I wish I had had that exposure when I lived in the city,” she says.

Laura Cook’s minireview was published in the July edition of the society’s “Infection and Immunity” journal. This was the first time the editorial board used an issue to highlight some of the “brightest early-career scientists who embody the future of research on host-microbe interaction.”

The piece, titled “Two-Component Signal Transduction Systems in the Human Pathogen Streptococcus agalactiae,” was co-authored by Lamar S. Thomas, a doctoral candidate in Cook’s lab.

“We only had two months to put together the review, citing 100 different sources, so it was a lot of reading and work,” says Cook, an assistant professor of biological sciences who joined the Binghamton faculty in fall 2018. “I wanted Lamar to help me because it’s good for her career. I was impressed with how much work she put into it, considering the short timelines.”

Cook’s research focuses on Streptococcus pyogenes, a bacteria that causes strep throat and skin and soft tissue diseases like impetigo and cellulitis. She also studies Streptococcus agalactiae, which commonly live in the gastrointestinal and genital tracts but can cause invasive infection in newborns, maternal women and older individuals with underlying chronic conditions.

“It’s not ideal that the only and best course of treatment is antibiotics,” Cook says. “We’re working toward identifying new treatment strategies. We hope our research moves in the direction of identifying new vaccine candidates.”

Cook did her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Minnesota. Her post-doctoral studies took her to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she focused on quorum sensing (the ability to detect and respond to cell population density by gene regulation) in streptococci and the role of cell-to-cell signaling as they colonize the host.

While working in the lab of Michael Federle, she began using animal models of bacterial growth, and her use of a mouse model of vaginal colonization developed into her current research.

Cook, Thomas and several undergraduate students are studying how streptococci grow and interact on mucosal surfaces in the vaginal tract and nasopharynx of mouse models.

Federle said he appreciated Cook’s coordination of his group of bacteriologists with a group with physicians at another university, both of which were researching reoccurring strep throat diagnoses among adolescent patients. The two groups were looking at relevant questions that could be asked in a clinical setting and were researching therapeutic options outside of antibiotics.

“She was really good at finding collaborators and teams of scientists that can work together,” Federle says. “That’s one of the biggest impacts that she’s going to have at Binghamton University.”

Another strength is Cook’s approachability and innate ability to make people — especially students — comfortable. “She’s a good person to collaborate with because she takes on big goals and ideas and she takes them on with ease,” Federle says. “She asks the right questions — questions that are going to need collaboration through interdisciplinary work.”

Brianna Sander studied the long-term effects of microplastics on host-parasite interactions in wetlands as a 2019 Summer Scholar at Binghamton University.

Microplastics originate from larger plastic products, like polyester clothing, that deteriorate into pieces and fibers smaller than 5 millimeters long. Surveyors have found the microscopic plastic in many bodies of water and even in bottled drinking water.

“With plastic pollution it is easy to think about the immediate effects — organisms ingesting it and facing health effects, stress effects,” says Sander, a senior majoring in biological sciences. “But the next type of question we can ask is, ‘Yes, we acknowledge plastics are going to be in our ecosystems for a long time, so how does their presence affect other long-standing relationships?’”

To answer this question, Sander tested two groups of tadpoles: one exposed to polyester fibers less than 1 millimeter long for 24 hours and then exposed to the parasites, and another group of hosts exposed to parasites and microplastics simultaneously for 24 hours.

Her results showed the exposure negatively affected the second group of parasites and their ability to infect the host. Although this may seem like a positive, as it would save tadpoles, it could also throw off the local ecological balance and negatively affect other populations.

Sander has already started thinking about how to take the study further. For instance, another study could involve exposing both parasite and host for a longer time.

After joining Jessica Hua’s wetlands lab as a sophomore, Sander worked with the assistant professor of biology for over a year helping to research similar relationships, but with a focus on chemical stressors instead of microplastics. Although this experience gave her a solid foundation, Sander needed to branch away from the lab’s history to pursue her research questions.

“I think something that is key in her research is that this is a new direction in my lab,” Hua says. “It took a lot of independence and passion from Bri to bring it about, and a lot of dedication because it meant she had to do a lot of background research so she could actually ask the type of questions she did for this study.”

Sander’s interest in microplastics came after she realized there was a major hole in how the contaminant was studied.

“What exists right now are experiments and research concerning the immediate health effects from the ingestion of microplastics and larger plastic materials, and the other half is surveys looking at what is in our environments,” Sander says. “I was noticing a huge gap in knowledge surrounding microplastics. When I pitched it to Jess, her eyes kind of lit up because she hadn’t thought of it before.”

Sander deliberated for a month between plastics, but she ultimately chose polyester microfibers due to their prominence in human products and many samples of water.

“When I was figuring out where these microfibers came from, I was just sitting in my lab and wanted to look at one under a microscope,” Sander says. “I realized the jacket I was wearing was 100% polyester, so I ripped a string out. That is when I realized that almost everything is made of plastic.”

Sander’s curiosity to look deeper into microfibers is rooted in her passion for science as well as her love of art. By combining the two, she created an Instagram account, @Bri_On_Earth, visually showcasing her experiences with nature in addition to a brief scientific explanation.

Sander wants to focus her future studies on marine biology, and she says her dream job would combine marine biology with art.

While growing up in Rocky Point, Long Island, Sander was mesmerized by the amount of wildlife just in her backyard. Although science has intrigued her since childhood, Sander knows not everyone had the same experience. She says art is the perfect way to involve more people in science.

“For my friends that aren’t in the sciences, they think I am some crazy scientist,” she says. “But little do they know that just them reading my Instagram captions is them engaging in science as well.”

Jacob Gordon, a senior majoring in integrative neuroscience, spent the past three summers documenting flies’ relationships with sugar consumption and stressful environments.

Drosophila melanogaster, or common fruit flies, are the focus of Gordon’s research in Pavel Masek’s behavioral neurogenetics lab. These flies often serve as model species in research; they’re small, inexpensive to maintain and have a short enough life cycle to provide ample data. While seemingly ideal, working with these subjects nevertheless requires immense patience.

Gluing flies onto slides for observation in a way that won’t harm the insects can be frustrating, but Gordon persevered.

“The students, at the beginning, are not always perfect,” says Masek, an assistant professor of biology. “And if they are not perfect, the flies use this, and they really physically peel themselves off [the slide]. … The fact he doesn’t get really discouraged; this is a huge plus.”

Masek said Gordon’s work was key to understanding that the flies peel themselves off due to stress, causing the flies to expend more energy.

When Gordon first joined Masek’s lab, he didn’t expect to be given his own project, much less be able to author a paper by the time he graduated. “I expected that I’d probably be working under a grad student most of the time,” he says. “I was really pleased to find out that I would be able to have my own project.”

His work in the lab compared free-walking flies to glued-down flies, and it became clear that even when both sets had not been fed, the glued flies consumed more sugar. He believes the stress of being restrained is what led the flies to increase their sugar consumption.

Gordon plans to finish his paper this year and he hopes that his publication will not only build upon earlier research, but also affirm current methods of monitoring fly activity.

“I think it’s really important to research on lab techniques because these are the foundation of more important research,” he says.

Gordon, who is applying to medical school, expects to volunteer locally during the spring semester while finishing his research. Outside the lab, the Falmouth, Maine, native works as a medical scribe, serves as vice president of the Student United Way and teaches piano to fellow students.

His biggest takeaway from his research experience? Everything matters, and you may end up creating ripple effects that can change what’s currently known.

“These little things can seem boring, but they are important,” he says. “When explaining my research to someone, they may say, ‘Oh who cares’ because it’s hard to see the practical application, but the practical application is that this little change could affect all the research that comes after.”

Last year, the Binghamton University faculty member received a National Geographic grant to support her work on Neuroterus saltatorius, a wasp that forms abnormal growths called galls on oak trees from California to Washington state.

“Meeting some landowners and talking to people, I just came upon a part of this oak gall-wasp story. There was a master’s student in the ’90s who did a little bit of work on it, and the Canadian Forest Service had done a little bit of research on it, but it just seemed to be this open question,” Prior says. “I thought it was relevant and a really cool study system to ask questions about climate change and range expansion.”

Prior, an assistant professor of biological sciences, earned a bachelor’s degree from Western University and a doctorate in biology from the University of Notre Dame.

She documents the wasp as well as the insect communities surrounding it, including other oak gall-forming wasps it interacts with and the parasitic wasps that attack and prey on them. N. saltatorius is of particular interest because of its “ecological release” — the removal of factors limiting its growth — and its subsequent outbreak as the insect’s range has expanded to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The expansion damaged several oak tree populations in an already threatened western oak ecosystem.

The $23,828 National Geographic grant made it possible for Prior and her lab, a mix of undergraduate and doctoral students, to survey these wasp communities at 18 different sites along the west coast. They have identified at least 25 oak gall-wasp species at these sites and will likely discover hundreds of parasitoid wasp species that they harbor.

“Parasitoid wasps are some of the most diverse insects in the world and some of the most functionally important,” Prior says. “What they’ll do is find their insect host that’s eating a plant and lay their egg into that host, and then their larva eats the host larva and kill it. They keep in check things like agricultural pests and tree pests, such as N. saltatorius.”

This work and Prior’s research questions will expand in the upcoming months with support from a two-year, $207,317 National Science Foundation grant.

Prior and her team also study other ecological systems. Along with wasps, she focuses on ants — such as those found on acacia trees in Kenya’s East African savannahs and those spreading the seeds of understory plants in eastern deciduous forests like Binghamton University’s Nature Preserve.

Carmela Buono, who is pursuing a doctorate in ecology at Binghamton, works with Prior and the ants of these eastern forests. Buono’s interested in how humans use land and disrupt ecosystems. This summer was her second collecting data and first without Prior’s assistance.

“My first summer she helped a lot with helping to frame the scope of the project. She’s very much a go-getter when it comes to collecting data, and she thirsts to be in the field,” Buono says. “She’s willing to get dirty and put her field boots back on and run out there. If she wasn’t there my first summer out in the field, I would have been panicking. She’s a true field ecologist through and through. It’s in her blood.”

One important concept within these studies is to understand how global transformation — land use change, climate change and the growth of invasive species — affects these important relationships and ecosystems.

Prior says that although her goal is to document the importance of these species and their interactions in ecosystems, she would also like her lab to focus on conservation and ecological health.

“I want my lab and field work to move towards restoration and management as well,” Prior says. “With the host-parasitoid work, it’s thinking about biological control — ‘can you introduce natural parasitoid populations to help control insect pests?’ With this ant project, we are still spending time documenting how changes are affecting this important mutualism, but our next steps are to think about restoring these communities.”

While drivers may be thankful for salted roads in the winter, biologist Grascen Shidemantle is determined to find out whether they’re harming animals. 

Shidemantle, a doctoral student at Binghamton University, studies how human activity and pollution affects amphibians on sublethal levels. She studies their physiology, behavior and interactions in the lab of Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biological sciences. 

“Across the globe, we see that amphibian populations are declining,” Shidemantle says. “By trying to figure out how human activities influence these animals, we can get a better idea of why we’re seeing decreases.” 

Shidemantle grew up watching countless hours of Animal Planet in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. While studying biology at Slippery Rock University, her love of animals attracted her to a research lab that studied the effects of pesticides on amphibians, equipping her with a range of skills in toxicology and endocrinology — the study of hormones and their associated glands.  

At Binghamton, Shidemantle is working on two studies: One explores the relationship between salt-tolerance and stress levels in wood frogs; another compares physiological differences in salt-tolerant and non-tolerant populations. 

The former project is conducted with an Onondaga Community College student through the Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program, which introduces community college students to research as they transition to four-year colleges. With guidance from Shidemantle, these undergraduates study corticosterone levels, or stress hormones, in wood frogs using equipment that Shidemantle helped purchase and taught other lab students how to use. 

“Before Grascen, my lab didn’t have the capacity of measuring corticosterone levels,” Hua says. “A lot of the chemicals that contaminate the ecosystem are endocrine disruptors. For example, there are pesticides that can cause male frogs to become female frogs when exposed at low levels. Grascen’s expertise of endocrinology helps us understand why and how these chemicals modify hormones. And how that affects an organism’s responses at a larger level.”

Shidemantle and her mentee’s corticosterone research is expected to be published before the end of the year. 

“Now all of a sudden everybody in my lab wants to do hormone research,” Hua jokes. “But what really makes Grascen so impressive is her genuine desire to do good for the world.”

Shidemantle recently received a 2019 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP), as well as grants from the NYS Wetlands Forum, the Society for Freshwater Science and the Pymatuning Lab of Ecology run by the University of Pittsburgh. 

She will soon visit with a collaborator in Spain to learn techniques to measure another form of stress — oxidative stress — that occurs when there is an imbalance of harmful free radicals and antioxidants that act as neutralizers. This study involves two other graduate students in Hua’s lab.

“I feel like science is changing in a really positive way,” Shidemantle says. “It used to be that if you didn’t know something you weren’t a good scientist. Now I feel that scientists are more open about having questions or hardships, whether it’s in terms of your research and experiments or like personal issues that come up by being in this field.”

Funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that supports interdisciplinary undergraduate research, Irwin worked on a pair of related experiments with Paul Chiarot, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Jeffrey Schertzer, an assistant professor of biological sciences. In the first, Schertzer studied how vesicles — small bubbles within a cell, enclosed by lipids — affect communication within a bacterial community; in the second, he examined the ways shear stress affects the growth of biofilms.

“What’s unique about this collaboration is that Rebecca’s device allows Jeff to grow biofilms in situ, to add stress in a controllable way, and to observe the structure of the biofilms, which are actually quite complex,” says Chiarot, who supervised Irwin’s work in designing and building the instruments. “Rebecca took leadership on this project, which requires a lot of initiative and a lot of independence. That would have been challenging for a graduate student, and for an undergraduate, it’s even more impressive.”

With biofilms all around us — between our teeth, in the slime on a rock, inside a medical implant — there’s hope this research will reveal what does and doesn’t make them grow, which would have medical, biological and environmental applications. By learning how to disrupt their growth, scientists can decrease the risk of infection; by learning how to increase their growth, they can create new industrial cleaning agents to reduce pollution.

Both are part of the motivation that drives Irwin, a 2015 graduate who plans to pursue a doctorate in bioengineering, and whose participation on these projects was a life-changing experience. “As an undergraduate, being able to do research at this level is really cool,” she says. “It’s different from being in a lab as part of a class, where there’s a desired outcome that your professor wants you to have.”

Futia says the initial reaction from his family was, “Why yeast? Don’t we already know everything about yeast?”

That confusion is what fueled Futia, a biology major and chemistry minor, to continue his research on mitochondrial variation in yeast at Binghamton University. It also led to a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which will provide funding for his work when he begins graduate school at Stanford University this fall.

So, why yeast? “If you want to learn how a Ferrari works,” Futia says, “you start by looking at the engine of a lawn mower. Yeast is our lawn mower.”

Working with yeast, a single-celled organism, provides biologists with more freedom and power in cell manipulation. Within the cell, Futia studies the mitochondria, which is responsible for energy production and metabolism regulation. The cells of all animals, including humans, have mitochondria. Yeast serves as a model organism, allowing scientists to extrapolate data and apply it to other populations.

Heather Fiumera, assistant professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University and Futia’s research advisor, heads a lab that focuses on mitochondrial genetics. Studying mitochondrial genomes might explain why two people differ in athletic ability, or help researchers understand more about mitochondrial diseases.

Mitochondria carry their own DNA, separate from the DNA in the nucleus. Molecular biologists believe this is a result from a large cell engulfing a smaller cell, incorporating two sets of DNA into a single cell, which then evolved so that all animals have separate mitochondrial DNA.

Unlike animals, yeasts reproduce by budding, a type of cloning. For years, scientists thought that through cloning, the daughter cell would have the exact same mitochondrial DNA as the parent cell. “We found that that wasn’t the case,” Futia says, “and no one has really definitively proved this before.”

Futia is incorporating these results into a research paper. He has also presented his research at Binghamton, as well as a yeast genetics conference in Seattle.

For Futia, the most challenging part of his independent research has been finding the right questions to ask. “When somebody finds a good question,” Futia says, “and nobody’s answered it yet, and they have idea about how to solve it, then they found gold.”

There’s a method to coming up with good questions, and there’s a reason Futia has been asking them. “He’s inquisitive and mentally prepared,” Fiumera says, “and a prepared mind gets lucky.”

Senior Alice Cheung’s dedication to her studies and research is evident through more than just her 4.0 grade point average in cellular and molecular biology. “I was really intrigued by being able to focus on one part of the science,” she says, “and finding out something that no one else has done before.”

Cheung, who is originally from Queens, began her research experience at Binghamton in the lab of anthropologist J. Koji Lum. Lum, who has worked with more than 100 undergraduate researchers, says Cheung stands out for her hard-working attitude and ability to learn quickly.

The project was a collaboration of researchers in anthropology, geology and biology. Cheung’s role was to characterize gypsum crystals according to the microdiversity trapped inside of the salt during its formation. The identification of these organisms would provide the team with information about what the environment was like when that crystal formed. The team then used the same technique and applied it to ancient crystals, hoping to find more clues about what life was like millions of years ago.

The team’s abstract was published in The Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Cheung also presented her findings at an international conference, a rarity among undergraduate researchers.

In the lab, Cheung would extract and sequence DNA from the modern crystals and compare her results with her partner, a geology major, who confirmed the findings under the microscope. When they looked at the ancient crystals, however, they weren’t able to find the same results.

Lum and his team of graduate researchers discovered that what they were originally looking for could not be found. “Although her project did not turn out as hoped,” Lum says, “I think it was a valuable lesson in how science often really works.”

In science, a dead end is really more like an open door. Cheung learned that lesson firsthand when she began working in a new lab with Steven Tammariello, an associate professor of biology. His team uses DNA from horse hair samples to screen for desirable genetic traits.

Cheung is trying to find the short fragment of DNA that codes for jumping ability in horses. The offspring of horses that can jump do not necessarily share the trait, so this science could eventually help horse buyers determine if a horse will be a good fit.

This same science can be applied to sequencing human DNA. Scientists are now able to screen DNA to see if someone is prone to diseases such as Alzheimer’s, which can help a person seek appropriate and timely treatment.

“I did research to help me decide what it was I wanted to do in life,” Cheung says.

And it did just that. Cheung plans to attend medical school and continue participating in research.

Persister cells aren’t naturally resistant to antibiotics, but by entering a dormant state and waiting until the medicine wears off, they’re able to start a new colony and produce a new infection. That’s why some diseases are so hard to shake, biologist Claudia Marques explains.

In her work with Binghamton colleague David Davies, Marques studied the formation of multispecies communities of bacteria called biofilms. The team succeeded in identifying a molecule that signals these colonies to disperse, making the microbes easier to kill with antibiotics. Those findings have been cited more than a hundred times.

“When you take antibiotics, you are only targeting the cells that are creating your symptoms,” says Marques, who came to Binghamton as a post-doctoral researcher in 2004 and is now an assistant professor of biology. “But there are other kinds of cells within the biofilm, and because they live in community, they’re much more protected than the cells that were killed. In theory, if you take an antibiotic in combination with something that will wake these dormant cells, you’ll treat your infection much more efficiently.”

If the Binghamton researchers are right, their discovery could have a significant impact in treating diseases that begin with biofilms, including tuberculosis, sinusitis and urinary tract infections.

“Claudia’s focus on waking the cells is what makes her work so good,” says Thomas K. Wood, endowed biotechnology chair at Pennsylvania State University. “She understands how things happen at the molecular level, and her work is important because it puts the emphasis on the right place, which is in trying to get rid of bacteria that are asleep.”

Marques was born in Angola and grew up in Portugal, where she received her bachelor’s degree before pursuing a master’s in medical microbiology from the University of London and a doctorate from the University of the West of England. Now living on her third continent, she’s starting to feel at home again, and has begun collaborating with researchers in electrical engineering and bioengineering, creating infections to study how different species interact within a single biofilm community.

“The possibility of treating patients better and improving their lives, that’s what excites me about this work,” Marques says. “That’s what got me into this work: to improve the health of the overall population.”

A gift from the Dr. G. Clifford & Florence B. Decker Foundation will enable Binghamton University biologists and their colleagues to conduct tests and research that will improve health outcomes for patients in Southern Tier hospitals with conditions ranging from ear infections to cancer.

The Foundation’s donation of $333,901 enabled the University to purchase a fluorescence-activated cell sorter. This key piece of equipment, typically used in cellular biology and microbiology research, will help establish the Health Sciences Core Facility, a multi-user laboratory open to campus researchers and their partners in healthcare and industry, especially those at Lourdes and UHS Hospitals.

“The Health Sciences Core Facility will strengthen collaborations between our faculty members and community researchers from Lourdes, UHS and elsewhere,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “They will be able to discuss their findings and share their expertise and data. Our Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory has been a successful model for laboratory research. Many of our partners treat it as a virtual extension of their own research and development infrastructure. We hope this new facility will fill a similar niche for research in the health sciences.”

One initial focus for research conducted at the Health Sciences Core Facility will be biofilms, which are implicated in 80 percent of infectious diseases. Biofilms — communities of bacteria in self-produced slime — pose a major challenge in healthcare because of their extraordinary resistance to antibiotics.

“A cell sorter will enable us to tackle the problem of biofilm resistance by allowing us to separate resistant and virulent bacteria from the general population and determine what genetic and regulatory mechanisms these bacteria use to survive and grow within the host,” said David Davies, an associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton.

The fluorescence-activated cell sorter allows researchers to separate a mixture or population of cells into subpopulations. For example, it can sift cancer cells from healthy cells or separate disease-causing bacteria from harmless ones. The machine does not kill cells during the process, which will allow researchers to study viable subpopulations of cells. Using other tools in the same laboratory at the University’s Innovative Technologies Center on Murray Hill Road in Vestal, researchers will be able to determine the proteins that these subpopulations produce or identify mutations using DNA sequencing.

The Decker Foundation is one of the University’s largest lifetime donors. Speaking on behalf of the Decker Foundation board, Executive Director Gerald Putman said the foundation is pleased to provide this gift to Binghamton University and support its plans to become a premier public university of the 21st century. “This purchase will help advance important research,” Putman said. “The cell sorter puts the campus in the company of an elite peer group and also increases its impact on community healthcare, one of our Foundation’s key goals.”

Binghamton University biologist Heather Fiumera thinks that some of those health problems may lie in the fact that mitochondrial function requires the cooperation of two different genomes. Every human inherits two genomes: one in the cell’s nucleus, which is a mix of mom and dad’s DNA, and a different one in the mitochondria (the cell’s powerhouse), which contains a replica of mom’s mitochondrial DNA. “It may be that some combinations of mitochondrial and nuclear genomes work together more efficiently than others,” Fiumera says. “While mutations in either genome may affect mitochondrial function, they don’t explain the whole story. You might inherit a mitochondrial genome that helps you become a world-class marathon runner, but your brother” — who would have the exact same mitochondrial genome as you — “might not be as successful, even with the same training.” Similarly, a mitochondrial mutation may cause a severe metabolic disorder in one sibling, but mild symptoms in another, because of how the mitochondrial mutation interacts with their different nuclear DNAs.

Fiumera and her colleagues received a $1.25 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the importance of these genetic interactions. The five-year grant will help Fiumera scale up the studies she is already doing in yeast. “We’re swapping mitochondrial genomes and seeing if it affects how our yeasts grow,” Fiumera says. “And we are finding that it really matters.”

Kristi Montooth, a biologist at the University of Indiana, says the work may help to illuminate why metabolic diseases are so variable and unpredictable. “There are mutations in mitochondrial genomes that, on their own, don’t have a negative effect,” she says. “But brought together with certain nuclear genomes, there’s a synergistic effect that causes them to function badly.”

The problem goes back to the evolutionary origins of the mitochondrion. Scientists believe that a mitochondrion has its own DNA because it was once a free-living bacterium that was engulfed by another cell. But instead of becoming dinner, the mitochondrion was co-opted to provide energy for its predator. The two cells managed to work together and, over time, became dependent upon one another. Mitochondria have inserted some of their genes into the nucleus, and the nucleus uses protein messengers to control how much energy the mitochondrion produces and how it does its job. It may be that the two genomes are still co-evolving and still learning the best ways to live together peacefully.

“Heather’s exploiting a lot of the genetic and genomic tools that yeast offers to take this to the next level,” says David Rand, who studies the coevolution of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes at Brown University. “The ability for Heather’s experiment to track down the interactions is going to be quite powerful.”

Yeast is a single-celled fungus with some powerful genetic tools that allow Fiumera to mix and match mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. Are there special combinations that allow better mitochondrial performance? Does “strain A” work better with mitochondrion 1 while “strain B” works better with mitochondrion 2? Fiumera will decide which combinations thrive best by subjecting her yeasts to a variety of unpleasant environments — including heat stress, oxidative stress and low-nutrient conditions — and measuring how well the mito-nuclear hybrid strains grow.

Montooth says previous studies have focused on swapping mitochondria between different species of yeast. But by looking at the variation within just one species and exploring how that variation relates to dysfunction, Fiumera’s work is more relevant for studying human disease.

So far, Fiumera’s preliminary studies have shown that the mitochondrial-nuclear interactions are responsible for as much as 20 percent of the differences in growth rates between strains. “That’s huge,” she says. Until now, Fiumera and her team have managed to look at the interactions among only a handful of strains. The NIH grant will help to buy laboratory equipment that will measure growth rates in about 200 samples at once, helping Fiumera to test hundreds of different yeast strains. She predicts they will collect more than 10,000 growth rates in just the initial phase of the project.

The second part of the experiment will be to map the genes involved in determining whether a combination is effective or ineffective. Fiumera says she’d eventually like to see whether beneficial combinations are more common in wild yeast populations; if mitochondrial-nuclear interactions are as important as biologists expect, it is likely that natural selection favors different combinations in different environments.

But Fiumera won’t be doing all of this work alone. “This project is a marriage between yeast genetics and population biology, and it is enhanced by my actual marriage to a population geneticist,” she jokes, referring to her husband, Binghamton biologist Anthony Fiumera, who will be collaborating on the project. Binghamton computer scientist Kenneth Chiu will lend his expertise to help the biologists parse through huge data sets.

Since energy production is so vital to a cell’s functioning, mitochondrial genes and machinery tend to be highly similar in organisms as far flung as yeast and humans. That allows Fiumera to hope that one day her research will be used to devise treatments for people who are suffering from debilitating metabolic disorders.

“You have to understand the mechanism behind a problem,” she says, “before you can fix the problem.”

Now it’s possible to boost the odds of getting a winner with a simple genetic test. ThoroughGen, founded by Binghamton biologist Steven Tammariello, performs genetic testing on horses. The company is one of four competing in the equine genetic-testing business.

ThoroughGen offers a basic three-gene test for Thoroughbreds at a cost of $175. It screens for one gene that is vital to energy production and two tied to muscle function. Energy production is linked to stamina, muscle twitch to speed. For an added fee, the company will check for additional genes associated with behavior and soundness, including bone density and heart size. The behavior genes indicate whether a horse is likely to be trainable, and soundness is a critical concern since some racehorses are prone to breakdown.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Tammariello, noting that the horse has some 21,000 genes.

The business really takes off at horse sales, where potential buyers want to find out if they’re getting a horse with promise. ThoroughGen and its partner, Performance Genetics, deliver results overnight, a critical consideration at a horse sale where buyers have to make up their minds quickly. Tammariello carts a portable testing device to sales. “If I receive a sample by 4 p.m., I can give clients results the next morning,” he says. Just one strand of hair from the horse’s mane is all he needs.

The field is so new that it’s still fighting pockets of resistance. “If someone comes to a sale expecting to sell their horse for $400,000, I can understand why they would be nervous that we might say the horse has a flaw,” Tammariello says. Still, for many breeders in the Thoroughbred industry, genetic testing is the future.

And it’s the future for other breeds of horses as well, not just the racers. “If buyers want to find out what makes the strongest Belgians, we can do that,” Tammariello says. “I’ve been contacted by an Argentinean group that wants to figure out which gene variants are found in a top polo pony. We can look at any variation that anybody wants to look at, in any breed of horse.”

Of course, the tests aren’t foolproof. The right genes don’t guarantee a winner; the wrong genes don’t guarantee a loser. But the tests do boost the odds of picking fast horses and avoiding slow ones. “Only a small percentage of horses overcome genetic flaws,” Tammariello says.

Tammariello grew up near Erie, Pa. His father, a geneticist, taught biology at nearby Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. When he had time, young Tammariello would watch Thoroughbred races at Erie’s Commodore Downs.

Tammariello earned a Ph.D. at Ohio State, where he studied molecular genetics, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Kentucky, where he looked at the molecular regulation of Alzheimer’s disease. Afterward, he joined Binghamton’s faculty, focusing on research in Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative illnesses. “I wasn’t trained as a horse geneticist,” he says. “But I’ve always been a fan of horse racing, and my wife and I have owned partial interest in nine horses.”

One day Tammariello wondered if there was a way to look at a horse genetically in order to get a predictor of its racing potential. “I assumed that someone would have already done genetic testing on Thoroughbreds,” he says. Yet when he did an Internet search to find genetic-testing services, he came up with none.

So Tammariello, with help from a small group of researchers, began to look for Thoroughbred genes linked to athleticism. “If we found a gene that was important to athleticism in greyhounds or humans, we looked to see if we could find the same genes in the horse,” he says. Gradually, they found some.

They also compared breeds of horses to one another. “We looked at genes that were important to muscle twitch and energy in breeds from Belgian draft horses to Thoroughbreds,” Tammariello says. “We found a variant in draft horses that was also found in slow Thoroughbreds. A lot of our clients have brood mares and they want to know whether they carry the variant for slower muscle twitch. Slower twitch is useful for muscular power, but not for speed. We can test a whole bunch of Thoroughbreds and predict which ones aren’t going to make it to the track.”

This gives breeders a new option. They can continue to breed top horses to top horses, or they can use the tests to figure out which horses might make the best breeding match. That should produce more good horses, though not necessarily faster times. “Honestly, I don’t think speeds will get faster,” Tammariello says. “I tell my clients that this is not a way to breed superhorses. What we are trying to do is decrease the number of substandard horses that are produced.”

Texas Thoroughbred breeder and veterinarian Jim Ward has used Tammariello’s services. “Genetic testing is probably going to be a game changer,” Ward says. “I’m familiar with beef cattle and dairy cattle, where they made big strides in breeding after identifying gen- etic traits. I don’t see why it couldn’t work the same in horses. The logic is good.

“If you can eliminate those horses that don’t have a chance, you’re going to save yourself a lot of money,” he adds. “Training race horses is expensive. You’ve got to do it for a year or so before someone tells you that your horse can’t run. We’re talking about $25,000 a year in training and veterinary expenses.”

There is, as you might expect, a parallel genetic testing movement for human athletes. A growing number of companies offer tests that suggest which children might excel in which sports and which aren’t likely to excel at all. But if a child proves to be a washout in sports, he or she can go onto other things. Racehorses aren’t so lucky.

“Right now, there are more Thoroughbreds produced than ever make it to the track,” Tammariello says. “In fact, about one-third of the Thoroughbreds born each year will never race. Some are not sound enough. Some are not fast enough. So there’s a whole population of horses that they don’t know what to do with.”

But by genetically testing stallions and mares, breeders may get a better idea which matches are likely to pay off. “We wanted to improve the chance of horses running well,” Tammariello says. “At the same time, we wanted to decrease this surplus of horses. If you have a good idea of what you will get, you may forgo breeding horses that have a high probability of failure as racehorses.”