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Middle-schooler finds goose poop that has cancer-fighting compound

“My mom, auntie and grandma have all had cancer, so it makes me happy that something I found could help,” said Camarria Williams.        https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/12/22/middle-school-stem-goose-poop/ utm_campaign=wp_evening_edition&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F4011019%2F67688be1c2ea5077876b0b41%2F59698d799bbc0f6d71c2db6d%2F30%2F44%2F67688be1c2ea5077876b0b41



When Camarria Williams, 13, stumbled upon goose poop in a neighborhood park, she enthusiastically scooped some up. She and six other students were looking for bacteria samples. For Camarria, signing up for the program was a no-brainer. “I’ve always liked science and found it interesting, like how you can mix chemicals to make something,” she said. She did not anticipate, however, that her involvement in the program would result in her and university researchers’ uncovering a novel compound with cancer-fighting capabilities.

“My mom feeds animals, and I know birds eat everything and anything,” said Camarria, an eighth-grade student at William H. Brown STEM Magnet School in Chicago. “I knew there must be in bacteria in it.”

After collecting their samples, students in the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab, a STEM outreach program, were taught how to isolate bacteria and program a robot to catalogue it and track antimicrobial activity. Camarria learned, with university researchers’ help, that her goose poop contained a cancer-fighting compound. She was stunned and delighted. The program — run by Brian Murphy, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago — partners with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago. Its goal is to give underserved middle and high school students experiences in biomedical sciences.
We established a university-community partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago (BGCC)─named Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab─to involve middle school students in antibiotic discovery research. In the course of working with a cohort of students from the BGCC, one student isolated a Pseudomonas idahonensisbacterium from a goose feces sample that produced a new cyclic lipodepsipeptide, which was characterized as orfamide N. Orfamide N is composed of ten mixed D/L-amino acids and a (Z)-3R-hydroxyhexadec-9-enoic acid residue. The planar structure of orfamide N was elucidated by one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (2D NMR), electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS), and ozone-induced dissociation mass spectrometry (OzID-MS). The absolute configuration was determined by advanced Marfey’s analysis, phylogenetic analysis of C-domains within the orfamide N biosynthetic gene cluster, and chiral high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis of the hydrolyzed and reduced lipid tail. Orfamide N was cytotoxic against human melanoma and human ovarian cancer cells with IC50 values of 11.06 and 10.50 μM, respectively. Overall, we demonstrated it is possible to integrate educational outreach with high-end natural product discovery while strengthening the relationship between the university and the community it serves.

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