The SWI Magic – by Ana Maria Barral, National University

PROFESSOR ANA MARIA BARRAL WITH HER SWI STUDENTS AT NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

by Ana Maria Barral

I learned about the Small World Initiative (SWI) in 2013, through an email sent via the ASM-educator list. The email called for applicants to participate in a training workshop at Yale University and required an application form signed off by a department chair. The deadline was a couple of days away. My colleague, Huda Makhluf, and I had been interested in research-based courses for a while, and thanks to that interest and some frantic emails back and forth, we completed and submitted the application form in time. A few weeks later, we learned that we were selected as one of the pilot partners to come to New Haven. In July 2013, I spent a crazy and inspiring week at Yale with 23 other instructors learning not only the lab protocols and techniques used but also the pedagogic foundations of scientific teaching. We picked and patched colonies from smelly plates, got excited about inhibition zones, could not wait to see the PCR results, and returned to our home institutions with the mission to implement SWI.

Most (if not all) institutions that implemented SWI in that first round were very different from Yale. Small colleges, non-traditional colleges, community colleges…both their material resources and student populations do not compare to those of Yale. Over the coming weeks and months, we worked and often struggled to adapt the SWI framework to many different courses and school styles, passing the hurdles of IRB applications and setting up the logistics of lab activities we were not familiar with.

My first SWI class was small, only 7 students. They were mainly pre-nursing students, a few were heading to radiation therapy or PA school. They were, as most of our students are, adult working students. Their main goal, which they did not hide, was to get good grades so they could get in the programs of their choice. Some of them were good at the lecture part, asking questions and showing they knew the material. Others were quiet and shy. In the lab, however, things started soon to change. With SWI, there are no right or wrong results, and so some students became really interested in what they were doing. They called each other in the lab to show off their stainings and wondered about the meaning of their results. They started asking questions, and very often, I did not have the answers, just as it happens in real science. I could tell that a couple of students were nervous about this lack of clarity; others, however, started to stand out in their efforts. One of the aspects that I love about SWI is how it empowers students.

In that first SWI class, one of my students, a quiet and shy young woman working as a LVN started to produce amazing results. Not only was her lab work impeccable, she was also studying Bergey’s manual and planning her next tests! A few months later, she would be the student representing National University at the ASM conference Presidential Forum. As I watched her glowing by her poster, explaining her work, and interacting easily with scientists and fellow students, I felt almost like a proud parent.

The magic repeated again and again with each SWI course. In 2015, the student who volunteered to present her work at the AAAS meeting student poster competition was an older student who never in her life imagined attending a science conference.

While one of the original reasons of SWI was to increase the number of STEM graduates, I see its impact on education even broader. To make students (any students!) aware of the challenges and excitement of science and give them the possibility to live it from the beginning to its culmination in a public presentation is a huge value. Our society needs citizens who know and appreciate science, and the world needs more awareness of the antibiotic crisis.

It is a win-win for everybody! 

ANA MARIA BARRAL'S STUDENT PRESENTING ATASM CONFERENCE

SWI’s Impact on My Students – by Todd Kelson, Brigham Young University

Todd Kelson's student Heitor Nagliati proudly presenting at the 2015 NIH IDeA Western Regional Conference

by Todd Kelson

Recently, I attended a research conference with two of my undergraduate students who were presenting their research results on the Small World Initiative (SWI). I was standing off to the side, and a faculty member from another college who knew I was involved in SWI asked me, “How is the student response to this lab?” This was my answer: A typical lab looks a little like this - Students come to lab and immediately go to the incubator where their plates are stored. They look at their plates and begin telling their neighbors what they’ve found, and they are excited to show off their zones of inhibition. They get their lab notebooks off the shelf and begin recording their observations. All of this happens before I ever start my mini-lecture for the day. Compare this to my old fashioned lab, where students sat at their lab bench quietly and waited until I began to speak. Then after my mini-lecture, they opened their lab manual and followed the directions, step-by-step. They couldn’t wait to finish and get out of there.

The Small World Initiative has helped to bring back enthusiasm about science among my freshmen lab students. They comment how excited they are to be doing something that might make a difference for the global threat of antibiotic resistance. They love working in a lab where they get to decide, to some extent, what they will do – and the lab experience is a little different for each and every one of my students. Their excitement energizes me, and I want to be a better teacher for them. Will we ever discover a new antibiotic? I don’t know. But the enthusiasm that my students have for science tells me that it doesn’t matter. They are becoming future scientists who will make a difference.

Press Release – Students from Around the World are Joining Forces to Tackle the Antibiotic Crisis through the Small World Initiative’s Novel Crowdsourcing Approach

New Haven, CT – An innovative program formulated at Yale University is allowing students from around the world to take part in the discovery of the next generation of antibiotics. The Small World Initiative (www.smallworldinitiative.org) is led by Erika Kurt, who comes from the field of venture philanthropy. Kurt describes the program as “a unique crowdsourcing approach for the 21st century to tackle pressing global health challenges while inspiring the next generation of scientists.” 

Launched at Yale in 2012, the Small World Initiative (SWI) is an innovative program that encourages students to pursue careers in science while addressing a worldwide health threat – the diminishing supply of effective antibiotics. It centers around an introductory biology course in which students conduct original hands-on field and laboratory research in the hunt for new antibiotics. Through a series of student-driven experiments, students collect soil samples, isolate diverse bacteria, test their bacteria against clinically-relevant microorganisms, and characterize those showing inhibitory activity. This is particularly relevant since over two thirds of antibiotics originate from soil bacteria or fungi. SWI’s approach provides a unique platform to crowdsource medical breakthroughs by tapping into the intellectual power of many people concurrently addressing a global challenge and advances promising candidates into the drug development pipeline.

Antibiotic resistance and the resulting diminishing supply of effective antibiotics are two of the biggest threats to global health today. Antibiotic resistance currently accounts for an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide annually. If allowed to continue unchecked, the number of annual deaths would balloon to 10 million by 2050. For comparison, that is more than the number of people who die of cancer and diabetes combined. Yet, for most, this problem and proper antibiotic usage remain relatively unknown. This problem is further compounded as pharmaceutical companies have shifted away from the development of new antibiotics.

SWI is addressing this worldwide health threat by promoting proper usage of current antibiotics and crowdsourcing new antibiotics. To expand its reach, SWI is partnering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and joining efforts with the World Health Organization and others to combat antibiotic resistance through the first-ever World Antibiotic Awareness Week (November 16th-22nd). SWI Partner Instructors and students around the world will be shining a bright spotlight on the antibiotic crisis, what they are doing about it, and how you can take action.

While helping to pave the path to antibiotic discovery, SWI is also inspiring the next generation of scientists. “Students’ attitudes on science are transformed, and they are engaged through research with real importance,” asserts Nichole Broderick, Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut. SWI’s biology course is now in 109 schools in 32 states, Puerto Rico, and nine countries, including Belize, Canada, Iraq, Jordan, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This year, the course is being piloted at the high school level at The Hockaday School, an all-girls school in Dallas, Texas to focus on reaching girls, tapping into a talent pool that is underrepresented in STEM fields.

According to Kurt, “the solutions to our current health challenges are just waiting to be found in the world around us and could even be discovered in the soil in your own backyard.”

Take Action with the Small World Initiative

Please consider taking action by sponsoring the Small World Intiative’s efforts. To donate, please contact us. To participate in the global Twitter chat on November 18th, follow @Team_SWI and use #AntibioticResistance and #smallworldinitiative.

The hockaday school – dallas, tx

Winners of the SWI Art Contest

Back in January, we started the SWI Art Contest to “crowdsource” illustrations for the design the cover of the Student Research Guide. The judges – some of our very own SWI leaders and partners – were amazed by the incredible talent of the participants and voted for the top art pieces. I am happy to announce the winners of the SWI Art Contest:

• 1st PLACE goes to Sarah Jeon from McGill University. Congratulations for designing the new cover of the Student Research Guide. Sarah’s work beautifully illustrates the name of our program and juxtaposes the different layers of our mission. Great job Sarah!
• 2nd PLACE goes to Yun Hsuan (Elena) Lin from McGill University, with a wonderful and surreal depiction of the research journey we embark on at the beginning of each semester.
• 3rd PLACE goes to Margaret Mass from University of Pittsburgh, which captures the methodology and observations that we are so dependent on for our research.

Sarah Jeon (1st place winner)

Elena Lin (2nd place)

Margaret Mass (3rd place)

• Honorary mention: Mitch Lambert from University of Northwestern – St. Paul, with a meticulous collage of lab supplies and equipment close-ups.
• Honorary mention: Natacha Maier from McGill University, which displays a fantastic “glow” of microbes living symbiotically in the soil.
• Honorary mention: Thu Truong from University of Pittsburg, with an impressive hand-drawn synopsis of our research project.

Mitch Lambert

Natacha Maier

Thu Truong

Congratulations to all of you on behalf of all the judges! Receiving and reviewing these art pieces was exciting for all of us and we thank you for sharing a piece of your imagination with the SWI community. These are truly imaginative, high-quality, and heartfelt works of art which will shape our vision of the program in years to come.

View all the submissions here >

Featured Student: Chad Coarsey from Florida Atlantic University

If you subscribe to the Small World Initiative Facebook Group, you’ve probably seen many posts from Chad Coarsey, a bioengineering student at Florida Atlantic University. From Gram stains to agarose gels to extracts fluorescing under UV light, his posts are instructive and analytical, expressing the thrill of discovery-based research. Originally from North Carolina, Chad was drawn to FAU’s tropical climate, where he boasts of going to the beach between classes. Yet, things didn’t go so well at the beginning of college, when he was faced with a drug-resistant nosocomial infection that almost cost him his life. After a year long recovery, he became interested in understanding microbial virulence and the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. He was determined to help combat the growing number of multi-drug resistant pathogens. In summer 2013, he took a microbiology course taught by Dr. Joseph Caruso and continued to do research with him, studying drug resistance in the human skin microbiota. When Dr. Caruso introduced Small World Initiative to FAU, he was thrilled to join the project. Chad, who has a congenital amputation of his left arm, developed his own aseptic technique allowing him to use only one hand. He feels that the independence he gets from the course has allowed him to become more efficient as a student and scientist, and has taught him patience. “Small World Initiative has sparked innovation in my academic life,” said Chad. In the future, he will be pursuing further research in the M.S. Bioengineering program at FAU, and plans to explore novel antibiotic-producer screening technologies.

ISU’s Cyclones Develop New Antibiotic Assay Called “CLONE ZONE”

Across the map, Small World Initiative students are devising new strategies to screen their soil bacteria for antibiotic activity. The screening process is akin to the discovery of penicillin, in which Alexander Fleming observed a zone of inhibition produced by the Penicillium mold. Yet every SWI student learns that there are many ways we can visualize scientific data. At Iowa State University, the Cyclones (the school mascot) have developed a new protocol called “CLONE ZONE,” which allows them to observe antagonistic-interactions between soil bacteria and the tester strains (safe-relatives of clinically-relevant pathogens) grown under different culture conditions. The students, led by microbiology and plant pathology lecturer Claudia Lemper, grow their isolates in patches and then plug the patch with the end of a sterile Pasteur Pipette. This produces a core infused with the secreted metabolites, analogous to a Kirby Bauer disc, which is subsequently placed on a lawn or patch of the tester strain. The tester strain is then incubated at its optimal temperature or oxygen environment and later screened for inhibition, which would indicate the presence of antibiotic activity. This protocol provides yet another creative way of visualizing zones of inhibition that resembles art, with all the rigor of science.

105 Students and 2,500 Isolates: McGill’s Systematic Approach to Crowdsourcing

Samantha Gruenheid’s class of 105 students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has no reason to despair. The class is split into lab cubicles of about 12 students each led by a teaching assistant. This fall semester, they collected soil samples from urban and suburban Montreal and cultured a whopping 2,500 bacterial isolates! The students work in pairs to prioritize two isolates for characterization. Recently, they obtained DNA sequences from the 16S ribosomal RNA genes of these isolates and identified various genera of potentially novel antibiotic-producing bacteria, including ones they had never heard of before. Among them were Brevibacillus, Chryseobacterium, and Dyella, a genus of bacteria that was recently discovered in Tokyo, Japan. Their isolates, many of which were isolated using Potato Dextrose Agar medium, were evenly split between Gram-positives and Gram-negatives. Gram-positive bacilli and actinomycete species typically predominate in traditional bacterial isolations, which skews the biodiversity students are able to observe. Their strategy sheds light into the culture conditions and techniques we can use to recover more diverse bacteria in the soil. Dr. Gruenheid joined Small World Initiative this past summer and is a professor of microbiology who studies host-pathogen interactions. “We’re having so much fun, I love the course!” she said, speaking for herself as well as her students.

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