By David Pike
Texas Women’s University
October 25, 2022 – DENTON – There is a dimension unknown to all, but not very common. It is vast, but embedded in the nucleus of a single cell and challenges the human mind’s concept of the finite. It is found in every living creature on Earth and within its womb is the blueprint of every organism, but until very recently it existed beyond human comprehension. It is the world of the infinitely small.
It’s also the classroom of Catalina Pislariu, PhD, professor of biology at Texas Woman’s University.
And it’s a bit difficult to get an idea.
“It’s so abstract,” Pislariu said. “When I started studying this in school 22 years ago (when she started pursuing her doctorate), I was on a level with a lot of my students who can’t understand this. How do you that?”
Pislariu, professor Nathaniel Mills, PhD, and teaching assistant Hala Samara teach courses in molecular biology, a branch of science that studies DNA and includes cloning. Pislariu, however, resents this limitation.
“It’s not just cloning, it’s molecular techniques, methods and instruments,” she said.
And it is one of the most practical graduate courses offered by TWU.
“It’s the type of course you can’t teach online,” Pislariu said. “It is intended for new graduate students to become familiar with molecular techniques so that they can use them in their own research.”
Molecular biology, a term that did not exist before 1945, is the study of how molecules interact with each other in living organisms to perform the functions of life, and applies to many fields scientists.
“In our class, we had cancer biologists, neuroscientists, protein degradation specialists,” said student Miles Gladen. “We all bring our research into the classroom.”
But something surprising happened in the 2021-22 class. Students not only learned to make discoveries later in their careers. They actually made discoveries about several unique DNA sequences that have been published in the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information Genetic Sequence Database.
“At first, I didn’t know that students would get data of such high quality that would be publishable,” Pislariu said. “They’re doing every little bit of work that a senior scientist would do in their research. It’s a wonderful experience. They’ve gone from having a gene identity, to moving that gene into a plasmid, to sequencing it, to discovering the sequence and to discover the localization code of proteins in a semester’s work.”
And the National Center for Biotechnology verified that the findings were new and correct.
“They were thrilled,” Pislariu said of his students. “The excitement it brings when you have a project that has a purpose, that starts with an initial question and ends with a final product that gives you a scientific answer, that gets them really excited.”
For the vast majority of the population, molecular biology is completely foreign. Most of us are unaware of its concepts and its language. For example, consider the title of one of the four published submissions:
“Medicago truncatula f. tricycle Nodule-specific PLAT/LH2 domain protein (NPD2) mRNA, full cds”
Or the title of one of the course search methods in the TWU catalog:
“Plasmids as Recombinant DNA Vectors”
And if it’s incomprehensible, try to understand the physical nature of DNA.
The invisible world of microbes and cells is measured in micrometers. A microbe, like a bacterium, can measure between 1 and 10 micrometers. An animal cell measures 10 micrometers. For comparison, one meter (slightly longer than one meter) equals one million micrometers.
But many of us at some point in school have looked through a microscope to see germs and cells. DNA, however, is in a sub-invisible world pierced through the electron microscope. In fact, it was only 10 years ago that the DNA double helix was first photographed in blurry, indistinct images.
Inside your cells is your DNA, made up of things called nucleotides, which measure 0.6 nanometers. A nanometer is 1,000 times smaller than this micrometer, or a billion times smaller than a meter. Yet these tiny organic molecules are the building blocks of the 3.2 billion base pairs of your DNA contained in each of your cells.
If that doesn’t emphasize your perception of reality, try this: if the DNA of a single cell were unwound, it would be six feet long. And if the DNA of all your cells were uncoiled and strung together end to end, that strand would be 107 billion kilometers long, or 22 times the distance between Earth and Pluto.
“My friends outside of school and academia say ‘what do you do every day? ‘” Gladen said. “There is a very high level of knowledge that students must bring to the course. It is not accessible to everyone. But for people who want to deepen the scientific field, it is an important class.
Why so important?
“We’re scratching the surface of molecular biotechnology, with uses we can’t imagine now,” Pislariu said. “And there are more coming all the time. I think the future of medicine is going to involve a lot of gene therapy.”
Gene therapy involves treating disease by repairing or reconstructing faulty genetic material, which promises to be of immense importance in a variety of medical fields.
This potential is reflected in the expected employment growth in molecular biology. Over the next 10 years, the field is expected to grow by 19%, far more than most industries.
The Molecular Biology course gives students the tools they need to be part of this industry. The class draws students from other schools, including the University of North Texas, and, working in small groups, students go through every step, from making solutions to using liquid nitrogen to grind tissue before extracting genomic DNA.
“I give each team of students a gene ID number,” Pislariu said. “From there, they have to figure out how to retrieve the sequence using bioinformatics tools, how to clone this gene into a series of plasmids in order to eventually produce the encoded protein as a fusion with a fluorescent marker, a protein fluorescent green.Through a series of transformations, the expression plasmid is deployed in tobacco leaves.Within two days, the fluorescently tagged protein will glow, allowing us to discover exactly where the protein is inside the cell.
There’s no practical use in making a glowing tobacco leaf, unless you want to roll your own cigarettes in the dark. The goal here is to learn the techniques and methods for using tobacco leaves as tools for locating glowing proteins.
“It was one of the best classes I’ve had for how to do research skills,” Gladen said. “A lot of techniques that I had heard about and learned in class, but Dr. Pislariu and Dr. Mills were able to guide us and did an amazing job helping us understand how to perform them and showing us the techniques that we can -be not every day in our research. It’s a real basic course for a doctoral student.
“You don’t solve everything in one session,” Pislariu said. “It’s the workflow. They do everything, every little step. Every step has its own benefit. Even if one step doesn’t work well, you learn from it. Sometimes you learn better from a mistake than when it all comes together.” goes well.
“It takes a lot of patience. And passion.”
#vast #curious