Zapping microscopic worms gives undergrads a leg up in competitive lab placements
Undergrads are utilizing their worm-zapping mastery to stand out within a competitive pool of science lab applicants in Boston.
OAKLAND – Past rows of lab benches stocked with supplies and behind a closed door marked with a warning sign, two undergraduate students sit shoulder-to-shoulder in a darkened experiment room peering at a live video feed.
“Ready?” asks Penelope Morris, a first-year behavioral neuroscience major.
“Oh no, not ready,” replies Jared Young, professor of biology and founder of the Young Lab on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, before adjusting the slightly crooked microscope camera. “OK.”
Morris begins recording and waits as five transparent worms about 1 millimeter in length mill about on a circular feast of bacteria. After precisely 20 seconds, she flips a switch and zaps the worms, called nematodes, with an 80-milliamp electrical current, sending them fleeing in all directions.
“There you go, that’s a good response,” Young says.
The students are among the newest crop of researchers under Young, whose program has equipped more than 100 undergraduates since 2006 with the foundational lab skills needed to advance their scientific careers. A growing number of these students are also now part of an informal researcher “pipeline” created between Northeastern’s campus laboratories last year, Young said, utilizing their experience in Oakland to stand out within a competitive pool of lab applicants when they move to the Boston campus.
Mastery over the infinitesimal twitches and squirms of these nematodes is the common currency of the two research labs, said Young, who gives students the kind of rigorous scientific training required to handle them properly.
When Young established the Oakland lab, he looked for an experiment subject that would be suitable for undergraduates without formal lab training. “That’s why I started working with worms,” he said.
Nematodes – whose scientific name is Caenorhabditis elegans or C. elegans – are basic invertebrates with a completely mapped neurological structure, Young said, and they are a cheaper alternative to mice or rats. But their real power comes from the ease with which scientists can obtain specimens with highly specific mutations.
“It’s easy to come up with hypotheses, like maybe this gene is involved, or this protein, or this biological structure,” he said. “Then you can see what sort of mutants are available in that gene, and just order them.”
Though the worms are an ideal organism for lab work, training new researchers on how to handle them properly is no easy task, according to Young.
“They’re microscopic, and so you have to use a metal pick less than a millimeter at the point to pick them up,” said Antonia Bellapianta, a sophomore pre-med student who worked in the Young Lab last year. “You’re looking through a microscope this entire time, you can’t do it free-eyed.”
Young’s research focuses on aversive behaviors in the worms that are triggered when they experience something unpleasant, like an electric current, he said. The Zap Project, as it’s known, seeks to provide new insight into the field of sensory response and neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to strengthen neural connections.
“Much like in experiments that people do with mice and rats very commonly, where you electrify the surface that they’re on, we hope that this is eliciting something in the worms that is akin to fear or anxiety,” he said.
Javier Apfeld, biology professor and Principal Investigator of the Boston campus-based Apfeld Lab, sees Young’s training as a quality seal in his search for capable cohorts to conduct similar research throughout the remainder of their Northeastern careers, he said.
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Apfeld’s lab studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging in the worms. And because the labs experiment on the same organisms, Oakland students arrive uniquely familiar with the subject matter, he said.
There is a hierarchy in research labs that typically places undergraduates in more supportive roles under the supervision of graduate students and led by the principal investigator. “Whereas here, they do everything,” Young said. For instance, after her worm training, Young allowed Bellapianta to concoct her own experimental designs using trial and error, a high-level opportunity rarely offered to undergraduates, she said.
Having that experience under their belts as they move to Boston is an attractive quality, Apfeld said.
“Having students coming from [Young’s] lab with already a year of experience and really hands-on, greatly mentored research, it’s phenomenal,” he said.
Bree Joy, a pre-med student in the neuroscience major, said the intimate learning environment in Oakland is difficult to replicate in larger labs, and the individual attention she received from Young instilled confidence in her as a budding scientist.
“He taught me how to present my work, taught me to post my presentations, and about conferences,” Joy said. “It gave me the skills of how to talk to different types of scientists and different people with different ways of thinking.”
Because of her work in Oakland, Joy’s name will be included in the credits on the next research publication from Young’s lab in the following years, he said. Coming as the first paper she has worked on at Northeastern, Joy said she believes the experience will benefit her in future research pursuits as well.
The students involved in the program are already experiencing the payoff. Thea Carr, a behavioral neuroscience major in pre-med, said she arrived at the Boston campus confident in her abilities, earning acceptance into the Apfeld Lab alongside Bellapianta and Joy.
“Because of the smaller student group and only being underclassmen, I felt like I was able to get my foot in the door for so many things in Oakland and build up that experience,” said Carr. “When I got to Boston and there was more competition, I was able to have a leg up.”
