Fourth time is the charm

WORLAND – Part of the Worland High School AP (Advanced Placement) biology curriculum is to inject E. coli bacteria with jellyfish DNA to create glowing colonies that, once started, could be manipulated into works of art in a petri dish.

For the last three years the AP biology classes have tried to achieve that goal but were unable until this year.

“This is the best it’s turned out, this is the fourth year I have done this lab, and this is the best we have ever had it turn out. We have gotten a handful of colonies here and there and thought we could take and try to draw with them but we have never had them grow well enough. This year we did a fantastic job getting them to not only glow and grow but we were able to take some of the glowing colonies and then transfer them over to new petri dishes and in 24 hours we went from putting a little bit on to these dishes just full of glowing bacteria. It turned out very, very well,” Worland High School AP biology teacher Karen Grzybowski said. “We have a really good thoughtful crew of students and we also now have a Warrior period (study hall) right after their class and that’s another 45 minutes. We took the full class and the 45 minutes to use as a giant lab. We needed all that time to get it going. So having that extra time built in made it work,” she added.

The thought of using E. coli bacteria in a high school lab might be disturbing but Grzybowski explained that there are good and bad E. coli and that the type the students used was the good E. coli. “What we got is the kind that lives normally happy inside our digestive track. So there is the good and there is the bad. We got the one that is supposed to be good but we still treat it as though it’s bad. So we treat it with lots of respect, disinfecting, gloves, goggles, try to be very careful, washing hands really well, disinfecting after, making sure that everything we used was disinfected just to be safe,” Grzybowski said.

The seven students, Isabelle Burky, Jonathan Anderson, Iesha Carson, Karter Dunham, Madeline Martinson, Meg DeBolt, and Bonnie Brunko,.in the class added that not only were they not intimidated by working with the E. coli bacteria but that they named their colonies, cared for them and competed on who could grow the largest colony.

The process to create the glowing E. coli was time consuming and Grzybowski stated that while it was a lot of work it was a labor of love. AP biology student Isabel Burky explained their labor of love, “What we did is that we had our E. coli and put them in some extreme situations where it got very hot and very cold so that it would break down the cell wall. Then we inserted jellyfish DNA into them so that they would glow or fluoresce and then after we got that jellyfish DNA in there, we put them in a recovery broth so that the cell wall would close and hopefully shut [in] that DNA. We let that grow for a little bit and then we put it in agar (a gelatinous substance obtained from red seaweed) on a petri dish and we only got little colonies at first. There were a couple small groups and then we kind of swept that up and we drew an image on a different petri dish with agar solution on it. So we all drew different things and then the next day we came in, it had been in the incubator, it had multiplied and grown beautifully. Even when we put recovery broth on it and the broth had kind of moved around, the DNA had gone over to that area as well. It grew wonderfully, it was really interesting.”

When asked why bother to inject E. coli with jellyfish DNA, AP biology student Madeline Martinson said, “We did this to model transformation and how we can use exogenous DNA in the surrounding environment so that other organisms can like take it up. So that’s why it glowed green because in transformation we have like this other DNA and then we have the E coli bacteria and the E coli bacteria was able to take up that extra DNA to make it glow fluorescent green. That was done by using a green fluorescence protein.”

AP biology student Iesha Carson added, “It was trying to show that DNA is transferable. Even though they were from separate organisms like bacteria and a jellyfish the DNA was able to transfer because DNA. There is a theory about it since everything has DNA all DNA can be interchangeable.”

The students felt that by doing this experiment that they learned about different opportunities in the scientific field. “The experience , learning new opportunities, new things in general kind of gives you an open mind-sight on thinking about things you might be interested in, in the future that you didn’t ever imagine yourself being interested in before,” AP biology student Bonnie Brunko said.

Burky added, “I think a lot of us want to go into science majors in college and more than anything it (experiment) signified what I am able to do within the science field and that there is not just a single opportunity for, I want to go into wildlife biology so it showed me all of these branches that I didn’t know about.”