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| Amber Bratcher with her first place poster at the University of Maine Graduate Student Expo |
The Connell Lab is excited to announce that one of our graduate students, Amber Bratcher, won first place for the Foster Innovation Center Award for work that best exemplifies innovation excellence at the Graduate Student Expo.
Congratulations Amber!
Specifically, Amber's work is on the detection of harmful algal blooms. Read more about her work below and here.
SPIRIT: A portable biosensor for the early detection of harmful algal blooms.
Amber R. Bratcher, Laurie B. Connell, Paul Millard
Paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) is caused by consumption of shellfish that have fed on toxic algae and is a major health issue worldwide. Low cell densities of dinoflagellates from the genus Alexandrium can produce dangerous amounts of PSP toxins. Toxin and non-toxin producing species are difficult to distinguish morphologically. Current identification methods are expensive, time-consuming, and require special training, thus the development of a rapid, low-cost, easy-to-use device for detection and monitoring would be an important advancement.
We have developed a method for detection of Alexandrium fundyense and A. ostenfeldii, two commonly co-occurring species in the Gulf of Maine. Our assay is designed for field-based identification and utilizes a custom-built, portable surface plasmon resonance (SPR) instrument. SPR is a rapid, label-free, optical detection method that measures the change in refractive index after binding (hybridization) of target to probe on a sensor surface. Species-specific RNA probes are bound to the surface of sensors in the instrument, and samples containing RNA extracted from Alexandrium are flowed across the seniors for assay results in as little as 8 minutes. We have verified the specificity of this method using RNA extracted from cultured Alexandrium, and this summer we will test our method in the field with naturally occurring Alexandrium blooms.
