School of Biological Sciences

Most biological research is grounded in DNA sequencing, a way to determine the order of organic molecules in DNA. The process is typically conducted by large-scale biotech companies, but the drawbacks can be time, cost, and environmental impact.

Georgia Tech’s Molecular Evolution Core (MEC) has solved that problem for Tech researchers through its Sanger Sequencing Initiative (SSI), which offers the same service conveniently on campus.

“What makes a researcher or a lab want to switch over to us? We provide the same if not superior-quality data to them,” says Nicole Diaz, SSI’s founder and manager, and a fourth-year student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We use an optimized process that is less industrialized. And the service we offer is more personal, so if researchers have any issues, we are able to be a lot more flexible than the big companies.”

Launched in 2020, SSI has evolved into a full-fledged, student-run program to collect and process samples for research labs.

Researchers can submit samples in drop boxes at one of six locations in the BioQuad – Krone Engineered Biosystems Building, Molecular Sciences And Engineering, Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building, Marcus Nanotechnology Research Center, Cherry L. Emerson Building, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences at Georgia Tech.

Samples are charged at $5 per tube for less than 20 samples. That price is reduced to $4 per tube with more than 20 samples. After 96 samples are processed, the price goes down to $3.50 per tube.

And with just three billing cycles based on the academic calendar—fall, spring, and summer—labs can easily reach the lowest discounted price for all samples by the end of the semester regardless of how many samples are submitted at a time, Diaz says.

Turnaround time is within three days.

The added benefit of working directly with SSI is its commitment to providing a sustainable sampling process.

“The carbon footprint is lowered by keeping samples local instead of shipping them across the country to have them sequenced,” Diaz says. “So, researchers have access to dropboxes just outside the door of their lab in the buildings here in the BioQuad.”

Lab technicians are culled from federal work study, student assistants, student volunteers, or those seeking internship credit.

“It’s great to have a foundation and building blocks where I won’t be nervous when I encounter this down the road,” says, Aaron Kent, a first-year chemical engineering student.

SSI not only services labs at Georgia Tech, but it can also support labs for institutions in the Georgia Research Alliance, a consortium of public and private universities in Georgia including Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine and the University of Georgia.

A Novel Idea During Covid-19

Sanger sequencing has been conducted in the Molecular Evolution Core (MEC) since 2018 under the direction of research technologist Naima Djeddar. Anton Bryskin, Regents researcher and MEC technical director, wanted to expand the mission of the MEC and tap into an undervalued resource on campus—undergraduate students.

“I knew that undergraduate students at Georgia Tech are very special,” Bryskin says. “It was never thought that undergraduate students might do a part of the work typically done by researchers or technicians.”

With support from M.G. Finn, professor and chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and chief advisor of the MEC, the Sanger Sequencing Initiative (SSI) was launched in 2020. The height of COVID-19 proved to be a valuable time for the program. Between sample processing sessions for Tech’s COVID-19 surveillance testing program, student workers were pulled to process sequencing samples for SSI.

“It was great because these students had already been trained on clinical practices,” Diaz says. “So, we didn't have to go back and train them on what it would be like in the lab because they already had the maximum training that was necessary.”

Diaz joined the Initiative in its inception as a federal work study student. Since then, she’s led the growth and development of SSI, from processing samples to marketing to hiring to building out a lab management system for operations alongside operations manager of the MEC TipCycling program and fourth-year biomedical engineering student Helya Taghian.

Not only have undergraduate students gained valuable lab experience, Diaz said, but SSI has become a multidisciplinary effort. The staff is composed of students from biomedical, industrial, and chemical and biomolecular engineering, as well as computer science and design majors.

“We have a stacked team,” she says.

Diaz says the team is working to incorporate more automation into the process, including tracking metrics for sample processing and developing a bioinformatics solution to optimize workflow and data quality. Third-party app integration to centralize the SSI workflow was tackled by the MEC web development team—comprised of computer science (CS) undergraduates led by fourth-year CS student Bakr Redwan—whom devised a custom Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). This LIMS system will serve as SSI’s hub for all operations including processing, billing, inventory, and communications.

SSI currently process samples for several labs across campus, including for Finn, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Mark Styczynski, and newly elected National Academy of Engineering Professor Mark Prausnitz, and hopes to expand to more labs in the future.

“We want to be an example program for other universities to use, implement in different capacities, and offer the same opportunities to their undergraduate students,” Diaz says.

To learn more about the Sanger Sequencing Initiative, including how to submit samples or join the program, visit their website.

Four faculty in the College of Sciences have received new funding to help foster student belonging at Georgia Tech. The team’s six-year grant is part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Inclusive Excellence 3 initiative, and is one of 104 new grants funded through an overall initiative that’s allocating $60 million over six years and several phases.

“HHMI’s challenge to us addresses a critical need in U.S. higher education, and it is aligned with Georgia Tech’s strategic plan,” says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College and lead researcher for effort at Tech. “The grant to Georgia Tech will support a team effort in pursuing a number of complementary projects.”

Collard is joined by College of Sciences co-investigators Jennifer Leavey, assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring; Carrie Shepler, assistant dean for Teaching Effectiveness; and Professor Lewis Wheaton, inaugural director of the Center for Promoting Inclusion and Equity in the Sciences at Georgia Tech. Collard and Shepler also serve as faculty members in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Leavey and Wheaton in the School of Biological Sciences.

Inclusive Excellence 3

As the third phase of the HHMI program, Inclusive Excellence 3, known as IE3, challenges U.S. colleges and universities to “substantially and sustainably build their capacity for student belonging, especially for those who have been historically excluded from the sciences.”

IE3 is also distinct from previous HHMI science education initiatives because it begins with a learning phase and, during that phase, learning communities envision how to move cooperatively into an implementation phase.

The grant uniquely challenges groups to work collaboratively to address one of three broad efforts. At Georgia Tech, the College of Sciences will work with institutions across the country to help empower colleges and universities to develop and support systems that cultivate teaching and learning in tandem with key concepts in inclusion and equity.

At Georgia Tech, each IE3 team member will concentrate on a distinct area of work.

Inclusive teaching

Leavey will focus on “working with collaborators from other institutions to share faculty development strategies focused on inclusive teaching, such as the Inclusive STEM Teaching Fellows program ,” she shares, “which the College of Sciences piloted last spring along with the Center for Teaching Learning, the College of Engineering, the College of Computing, and the Office of Institute Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

Leavey adds that, a semester after its launch, the Fellows program is already generating interest across campus and at collaborating institutions.

Inclusive impact

Shepler will help faculty assess the impact of their inclusive teaching efforts, working with collaborators to develop an iterative process to help institutions create formative assessment methodologies for teaching and learning that both facilitate and prioritize inclusion and equity in a manner that is consistent with institutional values and missions.

“Throughout the project, our aim is to make sure that students have a voice in defining what it means for them to experience teaching that centers” on these concepts, Shepler says.

The work coincides with a goal of the College of Sciences’ new Teaching Effectiveness, Advocacy, and Mentoring (TEAM) committee, which Shepler leads, to “develop and adapt new processes for the evaluation of teaching that are inclusive and equitable for all faculty.”

C-PIES

Meanwhile, Wheaton’s work as the director of the Center for Promoting Inclusion and Equity in the Sciences — C-PIES, for short — will inform and supplement Leavey and Shepler’s goals for the grant.

Wheaton will also lead a competitive C-PIES Faculty Fellows program that focuses on innovative teaching and research ideas that can transform student learning using key principles.

“The Center will sponsor approximately five C-PIES Inclusive Excellence Faculty Fellows in this effort,” he says. “This is an exciting direction that will provide the tools to develop assessments in our curriculum, leading to a culture that emphasizes and facilitates a growth mindset of continued development.”

Transforming tomorrow

Ultimately, the researchers hope to leverage the Inclusive Excellence Grant to transform teaching and learning for faculty and students of today — and of tomorrow.

“Though much of the HHMI work will focus on faculty, particularly those in instructional roles, the potential impact of these efforts is on the learning experiences of future generations of students,” adds Collard, the grant lead. “I look forward to seeing how the project develops — and how it fosters changes that support student, and faculty, success.”

Environmental scientists have spent the last few years sounding the alarm on the growing single-use plastic waste problem plaguing landfills. Consumer-based products like plastic bags, straws and water bottles are often named as culprits, but inside laboratories across the country, researchers are faced with their own single-use plastic dilemma—pipettes.

A single lab can discard an average of 36,000 pipettes each year. Georgia Tech is addressing the problem with a solution that focuses on reuse of this critical lab tool through its Tip Cycle program.

“This does not come from the traditional recycling method; the tips are not manipulated or changed,” says Adam Fallah, project manager for the program. “It’s more reuse versus recycle. The life cycle of the pipette is lengthened.”

Housed in the Molecular Evolution Core (MEC) of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB), the Tip Cycle program is capable of washing unfiltered pipettes to allow for multiple uses before discarding them.

MEC purchased the pipette washing technology from laboratory equipment supplier Grenova in 2020.

Typically, a research lab will purchase hundreds of boxes of pipettes, use them once, and then throw them away. This cycling program eliminates that waste and cost by reusing the pipettes.

So far, Fallah says the team has washed more than 746,000 pipettes in the last year, saving the equivalent of five tons of plastic going to waste.

Grenova’s technology is similar to a laundry washer and dryer—used pipettes are set in a tray and loaded into a washer to go through several cycles before being dried, repackaged, and sent back to a lab. The cycles include multiple-high heat rinses, UV sterilization, and sonification, which uses sonic waves to disturb any residue, like proteins, in the pipette tips.

Fallah says he uses an in-house cleaning solution and can customize it with a 5% bleaching solution if requested by a lab.

The full processing time for four boxes of tips is two hours and eight minutes. Roughly every 25-30 minutes another round of cycling begins as the boxes of tips are rotated out. Pipettes are returned to clients within 2 to 3 days.

“We can pump out 40 boxes in 5 to 6 hours a day,” says Helya Taghian, operations manager and a fourth-year student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We do 60 to 70 wash cycles of 200 to 300 boxes of tips a month. It would be a money sink if you bought that many tips…you have to be a pretty big lab to go through that many tips.”

Like the Sanger Sequencing Initiative, the Tip Cycle program was conceptualized at the height of Covid-19. Georgia Tech’s Covid-19 testing program was on the brink of being forced to halt the processing of Covid-19 samples as it faced a dire pipette supply shortage.

Principal research scientists Mike Shannon and Mike Farrell, along with Regents researcher and MEC technical director Anton Bryksin, called an emergency meeting to come up with a solution.

Bryksin devised an unconventional idea of washing the tips, a risky move given the sensitivity of qPCR techniques that can detect even a single molecule of RNA/DNA. Washing all the tips together also posed the potential for spreading contamination rather than eliminating it.

The Tip Cycle program garnered support from IBB and its assistant director, Michelle Wong, who recognized the potential for the project to help the university achieve its environmental sustainability goals.

Bryksin spearheaded the design of the program’s validation protocols, while Fallah took charge of implementing and organizing a student team to support the effort. The team encountered numerous hurdles in perfecting the washing process to ensure the tips were completely free of contamination, all while validating the washing protocol to maintain the accuracy of the qPCR results.

Bryksin says the program's initial success was nothing short of remarkable. It not only allowed the testing laboratory to continue processing COVID-19 samples, but also provided an environmentally conscious alternative that substantially reduced the amount of plastic waste generated by the lab.

As a result, the Institute recognized the potential of the Tip Cycle program and provided funding for its further development and enhancement.

At the same time, Taghian was one of several students supporting the Covid-19 surveillance testing program.

“There was a dark corner in the lab and my curiosity sent me there to see what Adam was doing,” she recalls. Initially, she spent much of her time helping Fallah rack pipette tips to be placed in the machine.

Eventually, she teamed up with Fallah to take the lead on developing an operational process for the program.

“I learned a lot of things about optimization,” Taghian says. “I was having a lot of fun and there was a lot of innovation in it.”

Taghian worked with fellow biomedical engineering student and program manager of the Sanger Sequencing Initiative, Nicole Diaz, to hire students for the Tip Cycle program.

Other aspects of the program began to fall in place. Data management charts and a workflow management board helped to keep operations running optimally. The duo also hired an industrial design major to create branding and a website.

“We want this to be educational,” Taghian says. “No matter what your major you can gain industry experience while doing your research. You’re dealing with vendors and actual instruments in a business environment. At the same time, your major has a place to shine.”

Scaling Up for the Future

Currently, the Sanger Sequencing Initiative and labs run by Associate Professor Kirill Lobachev and Professor M.G. Finn in the College of Sciences utilize the Tip Cycling program. Fallah says he is in talks to bring on another lab and looks to partner with teaching labs in the School of Biological Sciences to educate more students about single-use plastics in laboratories.

Fallah also wants to devise a plan to wash pipette tip plates, as well as find other ways to reuse the plastic inserts and boxes the pipettes are delivered in. The hope is to get as close to zero-waste with the program.

“Very few research institutions have a core facility with in-house services and in-house researchers assisting labs across campus,” Taghian says. “An environment exists on our campus where students can get an opportunity to explore an industry field without going off campus

Fallah says researchers are often “creatures of habit” and may gawk at the idea of reusing pipettes over fears of cross-contamination. But he stands by the efficacy of tip cycling as a sustainable way to manage pipette use and alleviate supply chain issues.

“We’re in a prime position right now to be a pioneer and change the future of labs.”

To register a lab for the program, or be hired as a student work, visit the Tip Cycle program website.

Sustainable Development Goals Action and Awareness Week 2023 is March 6 – 10. The campus community is invited to participate in a variety of events that increase awareness of and encourage actions that advance the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They address the world’s most monumental challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Some of the objectives are improved industry, innovation, and infrastructure; affordable and clean energy; and sustainable cities and communities. The SDGs appear by name in the Institute’s strategic plan as long-term goals that should guide teaching, research, and operations.

SDG Action and Awareness Week 2023 will focus primarily on SDG13: Climate Action and intersecting SDGs. Georgia Tech strives to be a leader in climate action across the Institute in operations, education, research, and economic development, and the development of a comprehensive Climate Action Plan is underway. President Ángel Cabrera encourages the Tech community to participate in virtual and in-person climate action events throughout the week.

On Thursday, March 9, at 8:30 a.m., Cabrera will convene a panel of faculty to discuss climate action. Joining him will be: Marilyn Brown, Regents’ Professor and the Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy; Andrea Calmon, assistant professor in the Scheller College of Business and faculty fellow in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems; Tim Liewen, Regents’ Professor, David S. Lewis Chair, and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute; and Brian Stone, professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and director of the Urban Climate Lab.

The panel is a hybrid event, with remote or in-person participation (at the Scholars Event Network Theater in Price Gilbert Library). RSVP here.

Other events during the week include a Green Cleaning DIY Workshop through the Office of Sustainability, a Social Impact Careers Alumni Panel through the Alumni Association, a Community Market through Auxiliary Services, a session on How to Afford Study Abroad and SDG Interactive Art Hours through the Office of International Education, a Seminar on Race and Gender through the Black Feminist Think Tank and the School of History and Sociology, two micro-workshops on aligning course objectives with the SDGs through the Center for Teaching and Learning and Serve-Learn-Sustain, a Corporate Carbon Accounting panel through Scheller College of Business, an information session and ice cream social through the EcoCar Vertically Integrated Project team, and a Climate Action Plan Stakeholder Engagement Session through the Office of Sustainability. View a listing of the week’s events for details and registration.

SDG Action and Awareness Week is part of a larger global effort through the University Global Coalition (UGC), which Cabrera chairs and helped found. The UGC is comprised of higher education leaders from around the world who work to advance the SDGs through education, research, service, and campus operations.

SDG Action and Awareness Week is an annual event occurring in early March. To collaborate next year, contact Drew Cutright, Office of Strategic Consulting.