In Garfield Park, Camarria Williams often enjoyed walking with her mother. There, the 11-year-old girl also discovered a new anti-cancer molecule in an unexpected source: goose droppings.
Williams and her twin sister Camerria, who attend William H. Brown STEM Magnet School, spent fall 2022 participating in a science program at a West Side Boys and Girls Club where they worked with researchers to identify potential antibiotics present in nature.
The North Lawndale twins were part of the third cohort of middle school students who participated in the “Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab,” a partnership between the Boys & Girls Club and a UIC lab led by pharmaceutical sciences professor Brian Murphy.
During a field trip to Garfield Park to collect bacteria-rich samples, Williams knew exactly where to look. She thought about her memories feeding the park’s geese with her mother, she said.
“The reason I got these droppings is because geese eat everything,” Williams said.
Now 13, Williams is officially a published research scientist.
She is listed as co-author of a study on the new anti-cancer compound discovered by isolating bacteria from her goose droppings sample, which appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in October.
“It’s been an amazing experience with the Boys & Girls Club, where they can adventure and learn more and go to different atmospheres,” said Antwainetta Hunter, Williams’ mother. “This is our future, children are our future. And so the goals that they set for themselves, I think it’s wonderful and incredible what they’re experiencing now.
During the 14-week after-school program, young members of the James R. Jordan Club on the Near West Side learned to collect environmental samples, program robots and test bacteria for their disease-fighting properties.
The middle school students not only learned scientific skills, but also actively participated in the work of Murphy’s lab at UIC, which aims to identify potential antibiotics found in nature.
“We decided to directly involve students in really interesting biomedical research and try to relate each step of that research to a different scientific career, just to try to ignite that spark, to interest them at an age where they I should start thinking, ‘oh wow, I could potentially make a career out of this,'” Murphy said.
Murphy, who launched the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab in spring 2022, said he believes universities have an obligation to use their resources to serve their communities. Murphy’s goal with the program was to help establish a stronger pipeline to STEM careers in Chicago neighborhoods that have faced “decades” of “artificial inequality,” he said. declared.
The program hosted three cohorts of middle school students in 2022 at the James R. Jordan Club. After Williams made his discovery, the program was held again in early 2023 at the Bartlett J. McCartin Boys & Girls Club in Bridgeport, with high school students participating.
Although the initial funding has run out, Murphy said he and Boys & Girls Club leaders have applied for new grants in hopes of offering the program again in 2025.
Williams was one of the “core kids at the James R. Jordan Club,” stopping by after school every day and participating in different programs, said Jonathon Rodriguez, technology program manager for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago.
Williams said she initially joined the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab because it seemed like “lots of opportunities.”
After the program, both Williams twins said they were interested in scientific research in the future. Both also said their favorite part of the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab was touring the UIC campus and visiting an actual science lab.
“We walked around and they had these chemicals and they were working on something,” Williams said. “It was just fun.”
Williams said she preferred the Boys & Girls Club program to her science classes at school because it provided more hands-on experience, adding, “I just want to go out and find things and see what it can do.” TO DO.”
When she grows up, she says, she wants to be a climatologist, a pediatrician, a scientist or a professional volleyball player.
For the West Side club, the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Program was “kind of an experience and exposure to the real world that our kids in our community don’t normally get to do,” Rodriguez said .
“For Camarria in particular, being able to say ‘Hey, you participated in this program, you tried it and then it led to something that you know will be used by the scientific community,'” Rodriguez said. “It’s just a testament to mentorship and programs that are truly focused on providing unique opportunities and experiences for our kids…their hard work and dedication can lead to something.”
The program was structured to “engage (students) in the process of antibiotic discovery,” said Jin Yi “Jeanie” Tan, a fourth-year doctoral student in Murphy’s lab who helped coordinate the program and lead key experiences. Each cohort was quite small, Tan said, with Williams’ group consisting of seven middle school students.
First, the students went to their neighborhood — which for Williams was Garfield Park — to collect nature samples, Tan said. They then worked with UIC graduate students or postdoctoral mentors to isolate different types of bacteria from the samples and perform assays to test them for their potential antibiotic properties, according to Tan.
For safety reasons, Murphy said, children are generally not allowed to work with bacteria in science experiments, which previously prevented him from involving community youth in his lab work.
However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Murphy’s lab was able to partner with the UIC Tuberculosis Research Institute to purchase a “colony picking robot,” capable of collecting colonies of bacteria and transfer them to new plates where they would be tested against a pathogen.
This robot could be “programmed from a safe location,” with young participants “still making all the decisions,” Murphy said. Boys & Girls Club members were brought to the UIC lab to program the roughly $200,000 robot and watch it at work, Murphy said, which for some was “the first time they’d been to the university.”
At the end of the program, students learned “how to analyze bioinformatics data” so they could each choose which of their bacterial colonies “looks promising” and should theoretically be prioritized for future research, Tan said.
“For Camarria, she prioritized bacteria with antibiotic properties,” Tan said. “So I followed the strains that she had prioritized, which is where in the lab I grew them and purified the compounds and then did additional testing. And that’s where we discovered this new compound that had cytotoxic activity against cancer cell lines.
The bacteria that Williams isolated and selected from his initial goose droppings sample contained an anti-cancer molecule that had never been documented before, according to Murphy. The lab’s partnership with the Boys & Girls Club has resulted in “high-end biomedical research that’s actually publishable,” he said.
After more than a year of research by Tan and other UIC scientists to determine the structure and properties of the new compound, the scientists wrote a paper on their findings that was published Oct. 24 in ACS Omega , a peer-reviewed journal of UIC. American Chemical Society.
Williams is now listed by name as a co-author of the study “Discovery of the Novel Cyclic Lipodepsipeptide Orfamide N via Partnership with Boys and Girls Club Middle School Students.”
When she discovered the significance of her own discovery, Williams said she was happy to have “done something that worked.” She now has a hard copy of the newspaper with her name inside.
Listing Williams as an author “was not charity,” Murphy said, but rather followed his lab’s own policies.
Murphy students must meet two of three criteria to be listed as co-authors on a study: physical laboratory work, intellectual contribution, or participation in writing the manuscript. Williams had checked the box on the first two of these requirements.
“It was Camarria’s intellectual input that chose goose droppings,” Murphy said. “None of us would have thought of doing that, and she did it.”
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