Community college students solve DNA extraction conundrum

From NHTI News: Two students at NHTI-Concord’s Community College have solved a problem that has impacted the school’s Biology II class for years. Noah Ford and Sophia Lemay refined a complex method to successfully extract DNA from a bacteriophage, allowing future classes to make new virus discoveries.

In NHTI’s Biology II curriculum, students must isolate a virus from a soil sample as part of the SEA-PHAGES (Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science) Discovery Protocol. An important step of this process is to extract DNA from a bacteriophage—a virus that reproduces within bacteria—but traditional extraction methods were not providing adequate quantities of DNA.

NHTI professor Beth Wilkes proposed this problem in her genetics class, suggesting that students could solve it as a capstone project. Ford and Lemay, who were lab partners, took the bait. “We’ve been buddies ever since,” said Lemay.

After trying numerous commercial extraction kits, Ford and Lemay tested an unconventional method that had never given consistent results. “At that point we kind of ran out of faith,” said Lemay. This method required even more steps and precision than past techniques, but Ford and Lemay polished the protocol. “We were short on time… then we did repeated trials, and it worked multiple times!”

NHTI’s faculty supported this intensive capstone project by receiving grant funding for the students’ work from New Hampshire INBRE (IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence), and by coordinating Ford and Lemay’s trips to UNH Manchester to use the college’s nanodrop spectrophotometer—a machine that measured the concentration and purity of DNA samples.

“This was the first time they’d ever thrown a bunch of equipment at me and said ‘go get em’,” said Ford. This project was more self-guided than anything the students had experienced previously, but the autonomy allowed them to get a real taste for a career in bio-manufacturing.

“It took until this project for the light bulb to go off,” said Lemay. She had followed in her brothers’ footsteps, attending NHTI as a fast-track to complete general education college credits. But this capstone project revealed that this type of work is her true passion. She graduated from NHTI with an associate degree in biology in May.

They will present on their DNA extraction process at the New Hampshire INBRE Annual Meeting in August.

View Ford and Lemay’s capstone posters at nhti.edu/student-achievements.