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proposal, he thought about his dad’s research. Gary A. Strobel, a professor of plant sciences and pathology at Montana State University, has combed many of the world’s forests and jungles, looking for plants that harbor endophytes and the compounds those endophytes produce. Gary Strobel has successfully collaborated with undergraduates on such projects. “The first thought I had,” Scott Strobel says, “was what if he went out and collected stuff that we brought to Yale and used to isolate microbes.” As he walked another block, he realized that the size of the grants made bigger dreams possible. “It’s a quarter of a million dollars a year, and the science lab part isn’t that expensive. Why
Percy Nuñez uses a slingshot to knock down and collect small branches that are too high to reach.
Yale RAIN FOREST EXPEDITION AND LAB course gives undergraduates a career-defining appetite for research CELIA HENRY ARNAUD, C&EN WASHINGTON
EVEN AS THE BUS zips along the Ecua-
dorian highway, botanist Percy Nuñez’ eagle eye has spotted by the roadside two of the plants his fellow travelers are hunting. He yells for the bus to stop. He hops off, clips stems and leaves from the plants, and hands them to Michael Vishnevetsky and Marina Santiago. Santiago gives a loud “woo-hoo,” raising her arms in triumph. Vishnevetsky and Santiago are two of the 16 students in the undergraduate course Rainforest Expedition & Laboratory taught by Yale University professor Scott A. Strobel. The class has spent half of the semester preparing for this adventure in March, which I joined. They are hunting endophytes—fungi and bacteria that live inside plants. These endophytes often produce chemicals that ward off other microorganisms, thereby securing a particular plant for themselves. The endophytes may also produce chemicals that help their host MORE ONLINE
plant and may even contribute to longknown medicinal effects of plants. Strobel, a professor and chair of the molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MBB) department at Yale, received the $1 million grant that funds the rain forest class when he became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2006. The HHMI Professors program aims to bring research to the undergraduate curriculum by giving research professors the money they need to innovate in the educational realm the way they do in their research. Strobel started thinking about the class after a lunchtime conversation with William Segraves, the associate dean for science education at Yale. Segraves told Strobel that HHMI was soliciting proposals for HHMI Professors and asked Strobel to consider being a nominee. As Strobel walked back from lunch, contemplating what might make a good
Tour a gallery of photos from the rain forest expedition on C&EN Online, www.cen-online.org. WWW.C E N- ONLI NE .ORG
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INTO THE WOODS
don’t we just take IN THE CARDS Vishnevetsky (left) the students to the and Salvador Nuñez places my dad goes (right) consult with and then do the en- Percy Nuñez. dophyte isolation in the summer?” Gary Strobel accompanies his son and the students on their travels and visits them during the summer, helping guide the collection and lab work. The older Strobel is easy to spot on the trail, wearing his signature red knit cap that unfurls to the size of a windsock to become a sampling bag. During the academic year, students who continue their research seek his advice via telephone and e-mail. Gary Strobel also forged the connection with Nuñez, an Incan botanist at the National University of San Antonio Abad, in Cuzco, Peru. With Nuñez’ vast knowledge of the native flora, the expedition is far more successful than it would have been otherwise. Before receiving the grant, Scott Strobel
GIVING THE STUDENTS ownership of
their research is a driving force in the rain forest class, and that ownership starts before students collect their first plant, with each student selecting a theme for his or her
M I C HA EL M A RS LA ND/YA LE U NI VERS I TY
spent nearly 10 years as the coordinator for undergraduate education in Yale’s MBB department. In that role, he oversaw the research-for-credit portion of the major. He noticed that successful students use the first person personal pronoun when they describe their work—my project, my idea, my experiment. “It sounds selfish, but it really indicates that they’ve taken possession in a concrete intellectual way of what they’re thinking about and what they’re doing,” he says. In contrast, struggling students talk about experiments and ideas belonging to other individuals such as postdocs or professors, the younger Strobel notes. “It’s clear they haven’t taken possession,” he says. “One of the key things I wanted to figure out was how you give them control.”
er plants flourish in the Amazonian rain forest. Still others thrive in the dry forest. The students prepared 8.5- x 11inch crib sheets with photos and other information about their plants. To protect against the damp environment, the students waterproof their cards. Some students think ahead and laminate their cards back at Yale. Other students wait until they get to Ecuador to slip the sheets into plastic sleeves closed with duct tape. On collecting days, the class splits up and troops into the forest, students carrying their cards along collection. Most of the students ARTFUL LAB Kassie Dantzler with clippers, plastic bags, global choose medical applications, works in Scott positioning systems, and two-way including women’s health isStrobel’s radios. The forest is abuzz with the sues or treatments for various lab, which is sounds of wildlife—sometimes diseases. Choosing their own decorated with a rain forest mural. birds, sometimes monkeys—chattopics increases the students’ tering in the forest canopy. As the commitment to the research. students slog along muddy trails The students did their cut through the dense green vegetation, homework preparing for the trip, using they keep their cards handy, scanning their ethnobotany resources to compile their surroundings for the real-life matches of lists of desired plants. Some of the plants the photos. They show their cards and degrow in the high-altitude cloud forest. Oth-
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EDUCATION
BUILT TO L AST
A Question Of Ownership It’s all about ownership. The Rainforest Expedition & Laboratory course developed by Scott A. Strobel of Yale University seeks to excite students about research by giving them ownership of their projects. For the program to survive over the long haul, however, Yale needs to take ownership, too. The funding for the class comes from a four-year, $1 million grant that Strobel received from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as part of its HHMI Professors program. Strobel was inspired by the Phage-Hunters program developed by Graham F. Hatfull, an HHMI Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In Hatfull’s program, high school and undergraduate students discover and characterize bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) from soil samples. As in the Yale program, each student has his or her own project. “Undergraduate students can very quickly spot the difference between an exercise and an authentic research expe-
scribe their themes to anyone who might be able to help them. Such requests pay off when the guides who accompany the group direct the students to potentially useful plants that aren’t on the lists. The airwaves crackle with the sound of students calling
rience,” Hatfull says. “It helps if you can identify projects that offer that sense of discovery in a digestible and ready manner.” Thomas R. Cech, the outgoing president of HHMI and Strobel’s postdoctoral mentor in the 1990s, appreciates the excitement that the Yale program has generated, but he retains some skepticism about whether such a program could be implemented more generally. “If a program requires a million dollars every four years to keep going, it’s not sustainable,” Cech says. “One of the exciting things about his program is taking students to exotic destinations like Ecuador. That’s going to be harder for state universities, because they’re not going to have the resources,” adds Cech, who has shared his concerns with Strobel. Strobel acknowledges that many schools can’t come up with $75,000 annually to send 16 students and their instructors to South America for two weeks.
each other on the walkie-talkies to say, “I found your plant.” Occasionally, student Salvador Nuñez (no relation to Percy Nuñez) lets loose a Tarzan yell. Many evenings in the lodges and hotels are dedicated to preparing samples from
Labor costs also make the program expensive. Strobel uses some of his HHMI funds to pay the students for their 10 weeks of summer research and to cover part of the salary of postdoctoral associate Lori-Ann Boulanger, who oversees the lab. Strobel believes other schools could adapt his project to be less costly. “Every university is located in a unique environment with access to plants that can serve as hosts for these microbes,” he says. “The idea of discovering novel biodiversity, having projects that are unique and personal and where there’s ownership, that’s all transferable.” Yale’s administration has been pleased with the rain forest class on two fronts—as a way to get students involved in research and as a way to bring an international flavor to the curriculum. Strobel first discussed his idea for the HHMI Professorship proposal over lunch with William Segraves, associate dean for science education at Yale. “I was just blown away,” Segraves says, by the way the class gave students ownership over their projects rather than relegat-
the plant clippings. The fastest way for the students to identify their plants is to ask Percy Nuñez. Many of the plants he recognizes on sight, but for others, he consults a taxonomic guide. On the first night, the group takes over
the dining hall at their lodgings in the cloud forest. They haven’t worked out a scheduling system yet, so the students jockey for position to see Percy Nuñez. The line snakes between the tables as the students await their turns with the botanist and his book.
could suggest an assay that would screen compounds for properties related to that student’s theme. “The simpler the assay, the better,” Strobel says. “But it has to be from a faculty at Yale, and it has to be reasonably high throughput, meaning you could take 100 or 200 samples and assay them.” In most cases, the students screen all the extracts collected by their classmates, not just their own. In the summer after the trip to Ecuador, the class takes over a teaching lab. Students who continue their research during the following school year move to the “rain forest lab” that Strobel carved out of his own research lab to give the students their own space. The lab, decorated with a bright rain forest mural, is too small for the entire
CELIA ARNAUD/C&EN
ing them to a small piece of a larger research operation. The course is also a hit with the administration because “Yale is in the midst of a major international educational push,” Segraves says. “The way Scott envisioned the course—where the students would learn about these other places, where they would learn about the ecosystem, where they would learn about the cultures, and where they would travel abroad to do these things— brought in an international aspect.” But will Yale’s satisfaction be sufficient to sustain the class when the HHMI funding inevitably dries up? Strobel is optimistic that the class will continue past the first grant, which still has two years left. The university has already made a financial commitment that will make it possible to begin institutionalizing the program at Yale, Strobel says. “Scott has developed an important program—one that provides real handson experience,” Segraves says. “We will make sure this remains a part of the Yale curriculum.”
Once they confirm the identity of their specimens, the students press two herbarium samples from each plant—one each for the botanical collections at Yale and the Ecuadorian Museum of Natural Sciences. The students also prepare two small stem samples they will work with when they return to Yale. After two weeks of collecting and preparing plant samples in Ecuador, it’s time to head home. Upon their return to Yale, the students plunge into the lab portion of the class. First, they need to culture the fungi lurking within the many plants they brought back. They place a small piece of the woody stem on a petri dish and wait to see what microorganisms poke their way out of the stem. The students then transfer spots to new plates until they have pure cultures with only a single fungus on each plate. The students assay their endophytes against a number of diseasecausing microorganisms, such as the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus and the yeast Candida albicans. This battery of assays helps them narrow their focus to the more biologically active fungi. The students then screen endophytes that pass those tests in bioassays specific to their individual interests. This year, Scott Strobel required each student to find another HOPEFUL HARVEST professor on Santiago clips plants in the cloud forest. campus who
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Even after their class commitment has ended, two-thirds of the rain forest students continue their research projects and make real scientific discoveries. class but allows three or four students to work at a time. The class has been a life-changing experience for some of the students. Sun J. Lee, a senior majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, enrolled in the class the first time it was offered, in spring 2007. As one of Yale’s Beckman Scholars—who are funded by the Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation for two summers and an academic year of research—she used the academic-year portion of her stipend to return to the rain forest with the 2008 class and collect more plants for her research project. LEE SCREENS extracts from endophytic fungi to find compounds that can help prevent preterm birth. She works with Irina Buhimschi, an associate professor in the obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive
sciences department at the Yale School of Medicine. Lee’s experiments involve treating biological material discarded after delivery— placentas and fetal membranes—to find fungal extracts that inhibit inflammation. These experiments may lead to the discovery of new ways to prevent preterm birth and the brain injury that is often seen when babies are born too soon. Lee has found a hit and is continuing to identify and characterize the active components. By early this summer, she had identified at least one active component. She will be presenting the results of this research at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine annual meeting in January 2009. When Lee was deciding how to proceed with the fungal extracts, she sought a mentor who could guide research in reproduc-
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tive science. She sent a barrage of e-mail messages to professors in departments throughout the medical school and made contact with Catalin Buhimschi, who suggested that Lee should actually talk to Irina, his wife and scientific collaborator. Lee has long known that she wants to go to graduate school, and her experience with the rain forest class and the long-term research project it has catalyzed are further shaping her goals. She now plans to pursue a dual M.D./Ph.D. degree. “Before I started” in Irina Buhimschi’s lab, “I was so unsure if I wanted to do this dual degree,” Lee says. She considered just sticking with the basic sciences, as many of her professors encouraged her to do, but she felt frustrated by pure science. “Where am I connecting to real people?” she recalls thinking. “Then I came here and was doing
Michael Cappello, a professor of pediatrics who studies infectious diseases. BenhamPyle will next assay extracts for activity against hookworm. Vishnevetsky, the class’s other Beckman Scholar, will collaborate with MBB professor John Carlson to find extracts that attract or repel insects. Vishnevetsky chose plants to sample by identifying those reputed to affect insects. Initial bioassays will use fruit flies, but Carlson hopes they will be able to move on to mosquitoes and work with collaborators. Even after their class commitment has ended, two-thirds of the rain forest students who are still Yale undergraduates continue their research projects and make real scientific discoveries. So far, six papers have been published or are in press, with more on the way, Scott Strobel says. And that’s after only a little more than one full year. I catch up with the students at Yale on a warm, sunny day in late June, the kind of day when the temptation to be outside can be overpowering. Music blares from a boom box in the corner. The students seem conFEARLESS LEADER tent to work in the Scott Strobel wades basement teaching into muddy waters. lab that they have appropriated for the summer. Each student has his or her own bench space, carefully delineated with tape. Their space and their equipment and glassware are identified with personalized tape colors. I wander from bench to bench asking students about their progress. I’ve serendipitously chosen a good day to visit. Today is the day that Santiago isolates the first crystals of a natural product from an extract fraction that is active against S. aureus. She is the first person from the 2008 class to obtain crystals. She proudly shows off the tiny red flakes in the bottom of a vial. ■ COURTESY OF SCOTT STROBEL
such relevant research. People say that being a physician and a scientist is hard, but I’ve seen people do it. I know it’s possible.” The class played a major role in convincing another student to attend Yale in the first place. Blair Benham-Pyle had been accepted by Yale but had not yet decided to attend. While searching the Yale science website for professors to visit during “Bulldog Days,” an annual event held after students receive their admission offers but before they must accept or decline, Benham-Pyle saw an announcement describing the class. “I thought this is seriously cool. I emailed Scott Strobel, and he responded within 24 hours,” Benham-Pyle says. “We met during Bulldog Days and talked for 40 minutes. I got so psyched about the class that it’s one of the reasons I ended up going to Yale.” IN ADDITION to
helping her choose her undergraduate university, the class may help her decide what to do when she graduates. Benham-Pyle, now a junior MBB major, is interested in science policy. When I chatted with her during the two-hour boat trip up the Napo River to the rain forest, she thought law school was the right path toward that career goal. Her success in the lab has convinced her that research might be a better option instead. “There’s more than one way to reach that goal,” she says. Like Lee, Benham-Pyle is one of Yale’s Beckman Scholars. Benham-Pyle attributes the success of rain forest students in winning this honor to the research focus of the class. Each student has his or her own project that makes writing a strong proposal easier, Benham-Pyle says. Benham-Pyle is continuing her research project even after the class has ended. She is already close to identifying an active compound from the S. aureus assays and hopes to have a crystal structure by spring break. She works with Scott Strobel and
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