Phage Foundry Participates in the 2024 Berkeley Lab Director’s Apprentice Program (BLDAP)
By Madeline Svab and Isabella Murray
Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, exist in every place on earth where bacteria live. Since bacteria are so numerous on the planet, phages can be isolated from nearly anywhere—even student’s samples from outdoor spaces in their local community.
This is precisely what a cohort of 21 high school students investigated this summer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a part of the Berkeley Lab Director’s Apprenticeship Program (BLDAP). BLDAP is a project-based high school STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) program designed to help 10th and 11th grade students from local public high schools develop 21st century skills, learn about Berkeley Lab’s research activities, receive college and career guidance, and develop a STEM network in a real-life work environment. BLDAP seeks to remove systemic barriers, such as a lack of access to professional networks and work-based opportunities, by providing strong connections to the scientific community at Berkeley Lab.
Phage Foundry team members from the Mutalik Lab (Vivek Mutalik, principal investigator; Denish Piya, project scientist; Hemaa Selvakumar, postdoctoral researcher; Mohamad Alayouni, research associate; Madeline Svab, undergraduate researcher; and Isabella Murray, undergraduate researcher) led participants through an intensive, hands-on, multi-week program, titled the “Isolation of Novel Bacteriophages from Environmental Samples,” focused on phage education and wet lab techniques at Berkeley Lab in June – July 2024.
In the course, students collected environmental samples from the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens, which they then spent the following weeks processing to isolate novel bacteriophages from. This allowed students to learn hands-on microbiology skills that are essential for careers in microbiology fields and generate a foundation for other types of laboratory work students might choose to pursue in the future. In addition to learning crucial lab skills, students learned essential information about bacteria and viruses and how they interact to shape our world. Students also learned to form and answer their own scientific questions, imagining new ways bacteriophages can be applied to change the world they live in from applying phage therapy to vet care to fighting climate change with bacteriophage.
The course culminated in a poster presentation, where students were able to demonstrate the understanding of viral biology and laboratory techniques they mastered during the course. Congratulations to the BLDAP students on their fantastic presentations!
Learn more about the Berkeley Lab Director’s Apprentice Program (BLDAP).
