Dr. Brian Murphy’s lab at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is committed to discovering the next great antibiotic that will make MRSA, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), and other superbugs a thing of the past.
Dr. Murphy isn’t interested in re-inventing the wheel. Instead, he’s leveraging millions of years of evolution to uncover antibiotics generated naturally by microbes in our environment. To this end, he’s recruited an eager team of underserved middle- and high-school students to help his team in their endeavor.
Dr. Murphy always envisioned mentoring younger students in his lab, but it was impossible due to the significant exposure risks of growing and culturing unidentified bacterial colonies. When the Murphy Lab automated bacterial colony picking with an enclosed, customized biosafety system, this Hudson Robotics system enabled them to involve students in their hands-on research projects without the exposure risk.
“It was only when we got the high-throughput colony-picking robot that I realized that we could actually connect University with community,” Dr. Murphy commented. The lab partnered with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago to recruit younger students eager to help discover a new, life-changing antibiotic treatment.
Dr. Murphy’s lab has always emphasized partnerships between the University and the community. Whether his team is coaching Lego Leagues or guiding students through hands-on biomedical research experiments, the benefits to mentors and mentees are apparent: undergraduate and graduate students learn how to teach, and middle- and high school students experience authentic, cutting-edge science rather than reading about it in a textbook.
“In this program, the students get a lot of ownership over their project. We want to be able to get them involved in as many aspects of antibiotic discovery as they can,” said Jin Yi, a third-year graduate student in the Murphy Lab.
The benefits of the lab’s partnership with the Boys & Girls Club haven’t been entirely academic. One of the bacterial colonies isolated by one of the lab’s younger students produced a promising lead as a potential antibiotic therapy, and the lab is currently in the process of elucidating the structure and the mechanism of the compound. They expect to publish a peer-reviewed article outlining their findings in the near future.
A high throughput, highly flexible for workcell automation offering efficient picking of microbial colonies.
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Unsurpassed ease and reliability for automating any automation-capable device for automatic analysis.
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A powerful, flexible, easy-to-use software program for controlling your laboratory instrumentation.
A high throughput, highly flexible for workcell automation offering efficient picking of microbial colonies.
learn more >
Unsurpassed ease and reliability for automating any automation-capable device for automatic analysis.
learn more >
A powerful, flexible, easy-to-use software program for controlling your laboratory instrumentation.
learn more >
