Charged Magazine

Tag: biology

  • Cholera cookies, delicious or gross?

    Cholera cookies, delicious or gross?

    TCBS is a selective medium for Vibrio cholerae, but this cookie didn't make me sick!

     

    Every December the Georgia Tech School of Biology has a holiday party with one of those never ending gift swaps.  Most of the presents are silly, and you never know if you are going to wind up taking home a ramen noodle cookbook or a puka shell necklace.  This year, every time I had a present I liked it was stolen and ulitmately I was left with the decision of whether to open the last unwrapped gift or make the game go on for another round.  I took the last gift, ending the game, and to my delight found it was filled with hilarious homemade science cookies!  Maria Nellessen, an Emory University biology major doing research in Dr. Brian Hammer’s lab at Georgia Tech made the cookies.  I recently asked her about herself and the cookies.  Read on to learn more about this budding microbiologist with a sweet tooth!

    A beaker, an erlenmeyer flask and a test tube. All edible!

     

    1) I understand that you go to Emory and are graduating this semester. What are you studying and what are you planning on doing after graduation?

    Yes, I am a senior biology major at Emory.  I have spent this year in Brian’s lab at Tech doing research in order to write and defend a thesis, ultimately graduating from Emory with honors.  I was initially planning on pursing a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics immediately after graduation, however, I recently decided to act on my desire to obtain a medical education.  Part of the reason I found and fell in love with science is because of all its implications in medicine.  I truly want to make a contribution to the medical field using a strong scientific background.  Therefore, I am planning to enter a MD or a MD/PhD program in the fall of 2013.  In the meantime, I hope to find a job to keep me occupied (maybe I should add cookie making to my CV).

    This cookie looks like an agarose DNA gel. Hope there's no ethidium bromide in there!

     

    2) What inspired you to make decorated cookies depicting one of the most dangerous bacteria in the world, the causative agent of cholera? What about the other cookies? Could you describe the mice?

    To promote eating cholerae. Okay, not really.  Actually, I was in a grant writing course at Emory with a mix of both science and humanities students, and we were asked to give a creative presentation based on the project we were working on.  Since not everyone in the class was a biologist, or scientist for that matter, I was reminded of my first time learning about microbiology in my intro course and I distinctly remembered the proud feeling that came along with doing a streak plate for isolation.  To this day, I get that same proud feeling when I come into the lab the next day to see my plates with isolated colonies (success…I’m a scientist!).  I really wanted to share that feeling with my classmates, but I was limited by the fact that I couldn’t allow them to work with bacteria.  So I thought I would teach them the streak plate method and let them enjoy “results” through a cookie.

    I started getting practice making the streak plate cookies by making them for science related events (such as lab meetings and for my microbiology students).  I really didn’t want to go out and buy anything for the Christmas party (because I’m a poor college student), so I decided to make some science cookies, even branching out to new designs in efforts to brighten a fellow science nerd’s day.  Choosing to do a TCBS plate with Vibrio cholerae was easy because I work with V. cholerae in the lab and we use this green media (called TCBS) that causes V. cholerae to turn a bright yellow on the plate.  In a way, V. cholerae is actually quite pretty on the plate and I wanted to represent that in a cookie.  The other designs were just me thinking of other scientific designs I could do, as well as searching the internet for other ideas.  Sure enough, other people also make science cookies  I got a lot of inspiration from Not So Humble Pie (she makes streak plate cookies too!).  While I don’t research on mice, I thought they were cute, so I gave them a try.

    Uh oh, looks like one of those mutations is lethal!

     

    3) How did you make the cookies? Do you have any tips for the novice baker?

    For the record, I do not in any way consider myself a baker.  I don’t even have the tools that most bakers have, which would actually make decorating these cookies a whole lot easier.  I’m not going to pretend I have a secret recipe (let’s be honest here…I’m in college!).  For the cookie, I just follow the roll-out cookie recipe on a sugar cookie mix (I prefer Krusteaz) and use a cup to cut out the circle shape. Since I only made a few of the other designs, I just cut them out with a knife.  Then I throw together a powder-sugar based frosting to decorate my cookies.  I know….no big secret, right?  Anyone can make and decorate cookies.  Each time I make them, I may modify something to perfect my “recipe,” but getting the signature cookie takes time and practice.  The good thing is that your mess-ups are usually still edible and delicious!

    It must be hard to make a cookie flagellum.

     

    4) Have you ever made any other strangely decorated cookies or do you have plans to?

    My busy lifestyle rarely leaves time for me to bake for fun, but sometimes I’ll come across something (usually science-related) and think to myself “that’d be a cute cookie.”  I honestly have thought about perfecting recipes and publishing them along with information/instructions as I often do when I make my streak plate cookies for students.  When I made a batch of cookies for the Christmas party, I attempted to make a V. cholerae bacterium but it ultimately looked like some kind of squash.
    I’m sure my future medical education will provide me with plenty of opportunities to make all sorts of weird (and probably disturbing to most people) cookies.  I’d love to try to create a complete skeleton, where each bone is a cookie.
    Perfect technique!

     

    – So, it turns out making weird cookies is not as hard as I thought.  Maybe I’ll make some T cell cookies this weekend!
  • The Science behind ‘Frenemies’

    The Science behind ‘Frenemies’

    High school can be very painful for anyone who is the slightest bit different.  Thankfully, I’m 5 years removed from it but my little sister is a freshman so I get to sit back and observe this social phenomenon as an objective outsider.  When you’re in high school (specifically a teenage girl in high school), it seems that every social situation is a CRUCIAL moment in your life.  Not abiding by the invisible rules of pubescent social etiquette could result in getting shunned from the clique.  This, by the teenage spectrum of standard exaggeration, is death.  Girls strive to fit in and seek reassurance that they are ‘secured’ in their pack.  This essentially creates an army of mini tyrants disguised in pink twill.

    This brings me to introduce the concept of a ‘frenemy.’  A ‘frenemy’ is someone who you’re friends with by all appearances, but is actually someone who you would like to squirt ketchup on.  In the high school scenario, she might be characterized as the bully of the group or perhaps the arrogant leader of it.  Either way, you find yourself supporting her terrible behavior because you’re too afraid to speak out and risk losing your social standing.

    There’s a biological reason for this behavior.  According to Dr. Louann Brizendine, who wrote the fantastic book ‘The Female Brain,’ the main job of a girl brain is to keep social harmony.  The teen girl’s brain circuits are wired so that social rejection actually triggers a neural stress response (Brizendine 35).  When a relationship is threatened, the female’s feel-good brain chemicals drop (such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin) and the stress hormone cortisol takes over.  Now this has become a matter of life or death.  She’ll start feeling anxious and fearful of being rejected.  She’ll become cranky to family members.  She soon begins to crave that feeling of closeness again, for that great intimacy drug oxytocin.  She’ll eventually decide to stick to her clan of frenemies to keep that utterly important social harmony.

    This can also explain why girls go to the bathroom together.  Those girls hanging out in the bathroom are reinforcing their most important relationships- with other girls.  Many women find biological comfort in one another’s company and language is the glue that connects them together.  Talking and sharing secrets activates even more oxytocin release.  The oxytocin reinforces the desire to gossip and connecting then brings a sense of pleasure and well-being (Brizendine 37).

    Why exactly are girls built this way?  One plausible reason goes back to primitive basics.  Remember- our modern female brain still has the circuitry of our most successful foremothers.  Studies have shown that female mammals in a bonded social group are more likely to come to another’s aid in a threatening situation, such as if a male is overly aggressive to a female.  Members of a group can alert one another of conflict ahead of time, enabling them to move away from potential danger and to continue safely tending dependent children.  This pattern of behavior is called ‘tend and befriend,’ and it is particularly a female strategy (Brizendine 42).  Since teen girls are biologically reaching optimal fertility, their primitive brain begins to stress the importance of this strategy.  It’s saying, “Lose that bond with your peer, and both you and your offspring are toast.”  No wonder girls find it unbearably hard to cope with feelings of being left out.

    There’s even a biological reason for why some teen girls can become so evil to one another.  Hormonal surges can turn these girls mean but so can sexual competition.  This competition is much different in girls than in boys. When females are competing with other females, they often use subtle tools, such as spreading rumors, to undermine a frenemy.  That way she can cover her tracks.  Instead of using force, which is the male’s standard protocol, the female uses her best set skill-language- to get what she wants.  Such tactics lessen the risk of destroying the bond that the teen girl brain sees as essential to survival.

    The teenage girl brain is drowning in estrogen and other chemicals that make it pretty difficult to survive these years. It’s always drama, drama, drama. That’s not to say that teenage boys aren’t dealing with an insurgence of hormones- they are and they have their own set of embarrassing problems.  But research findings like these can reassure a gal that her feelings of mayhem are only temporary.  So if you are a teenage girl, remind yourself that you will mellow out.  Then remember to tell your frenemy that it is not her fault she’s acting like a jerk but that it is just her cortisol coming out to play.

    Brizendine, Louanne. The Female Brain.  New York: Broadway Books, 2006.

     

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