Cell-Free Biosensors
When accepted into the University of Maryland, I was also offered admission into the FIRE program (The First-Year Innovation & Research Experience). As an 18-year-old straight out of AP Biology, I figured “eh, might as well.” At that point, I knew I liked science, and wanted to do cool stuff with it.
Honestly, at that point in my life, I wanted to be an astrobiologist. I had come out of the summer binge watching Lost in Space and (embarrassingly) Voltron, and I wanted to learn the mysteries of space in the context of biology. I even considered attending Penn State for their Astrobiology graduate program (as a proud Terp I now shudder at the thought). I’d still love to involve my future studies in astrobiological research, but I don’t care to throw myself into the Fermi Paradox and the existential questions that come along with the search for life.
Regardless, I chose the Molecular Diagnostics Lab in FIRE, run by Dr. Catherine Spirito. Dr. Spirito was a very kind professor, and gave me more benefit of the doubt then I probably deserved for the level of effort I put into her lab. I’d like to think that she understood I cared a lot about the science and the opportunity to do fun lab techniques, but hadn’t mastered the skill of time management yet (… do we ever truly master it?).
I started working in the MD lab in January 2020. Unfortunately, as anyone reading this would know, we were sent home a mere 2 months later. At that point we had only gotten to do safety protocols and practice trials of lab techniques — no real experiments of our own. It was really disappointing.
The students in the Molecular Diagnostics Lab in the FIRE Program. Photo via FIRE.
In the online version of FIRE, we still did some research. We split up into teams of four and did literature reviews on a topic of our choice as well as put together a proposal for a future project. My team and I proposed a design for a cell-free biosensor that would detect heavy metals in drinking water.
Cell-free biosensors are essentially just a few essential cell parts (DNA, proteins, etc) being “thrown together” with a bunch of fancy techniques so that the product will bind to your desired target and also give you a signal. They exist in a bunch of different forms and that’s a super simplified and sort of messy way of explaining it, but if you’re interested in more information you can check out the website my team and I made.
Among the few things that actually happened to me over the isolation period of March to August 2020, FIRE probably was one of the more interesting things and a big academic confidence booster. In October 2020, Dr. Spirito recommended me to pilot an Instagram takeover for UMD FIRE’s official social media. It was actually a lot of fun and it was a big confidence booster in my ability to communicate science and a reminder that what I was doing at school was really cool. It was really rewarding to receive praise from the people in charge of the program and I was happy to do something to help the program that’d helped me get started in research.
Essentially, FIRE being cut short (in person-wise) was really disappointing, but also fueled my desire to seek out another lab and made me interested in what else I could do with science besides just literature reviews and science communication. I dipped my toe in, but I wanted to dive in.
Cover photo sourced from this blog.
