Summer 2001 -- Vol. 18, No. 2

High-School Teacher and Student Spark Study, Later Publication

High-school teacher Pat Peterson thought what she saw was obvious—thousands of blood-red dots moving about in a collection of animals and vegetation brought from the Pacific Ocean floor onto the deck of a research ship had to be tiny copepods that contained hemoglobin.

Participating as a guest with the Research and Education: Volcanoes, Exploration and Life (REVEL) program, Peterson was a rookie at research. Still, the high-school teacher from Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, was certain the red color in the tiny crustaceans meant their blood contained hemoglobin for carrying oxygen.

“None of us had ever heard of copepods with hemoglobin before,” said Charles Fisher, professor of biology at Penn State and the chief scientist on the expedition at the Juan de Fuca Ridge, located off the coast of the state of Washington. “Copepods are very small and don’t need hemoglobin in their blood to obtain oxygen. So, we kind of poo-pooed her at first.”

Unbowed, Peterson painstakingly collected about 6,000 of the tiny creatures for later examination. Needing thousands just to produce one drop of the red substance to study, she collected as many as possible, one by one. Those samples were then frozen and shipped to Penn State. Once the expedition ended, Fisher returned to Penn State and Peterson went back to her classroom at Palisades High School. She did not forget about the copepods, though.

“She went back to her school and found this student who was really interested and wanted to follow up,” Fisher said. “They came to Penn State to start the research and the first thing we did was to look at the spectra of the substance and we were surprised to find it actually contained hemoglobin. Then we started looking at it more closely.”

The team’s resulting research constitutes the first study on the structure and function of copepod hemoglobin, and was published in the October 2000 issue of Biological Bulletin.

The research determined the hemoglobin carries oxygen in a highly efficient manner. The research also determined the hemoglobin does not provide a large storage pool of oxygen. Instead, the hemoglobin supports aerobic respiration in the copepods, which were found living among large tubeworms hundreds of feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Stéphane Hourdez, the first author of the paper, is an instructor completing his postdoctoral work at the University. He worked in Fisher's laboratory as a graduate student.

Listed after Hourdez as authors of the paper are: Jason Lamontagne, Peterson’s ambitious and curious student; Peterson; Roy E. Weber, from the Center for Respiratory Adaptation at the University of Aarhus (Denmark); and Fisher.

“It’s unusual for a high-school student, or teacher, to be an author on a scientific research paper, but they really kept us going.” Fisher said. “Peterson’s interest sparked the study and her collections at sea made the study possible. Jason’s work in the laboratory was also a significant contribution. We would not have pursued this idea without them.”

The publication was the first of its kind generated by a participant in the REVEL program, which is designed to provide research experience for high-school teachers and to encourage those teachers to take what they learn during summer research cruises back to their respective classrooms. The program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Penn State, the University of Washington, and the Museum of Natural History in New York, has been in existence since 1996.

by Steve Sampsell

Understanding the Small Scale of Science

Materials science usually requires researchers and theorists to work with super-small scales and structures. Often, they conduct their work at the nanoscale level and work with devices that can measure or sense changes at the tiniest imaginable increments.

In the laboratory of A. Welford Castleman, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics and Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science, such technology includes a femtosecond laser.

How long does a femtosecond last? Technically, 10^-15 seconds, which remains hard to understand until professor Castleman provides some perspective.

"If you had 25 football fields, each covered three feet high with sand, and you picked 1 grain of sand off one of the fields, that would be about equal to one part in 10^-15 of the sand -- or the same fraction that a femtosecond is of a second," Castleman says. "It's not a long time, but a lot happens in that period."

Outstanding Thesis Earns Xerox Award

Doctoral student Peihong Zhang, received The Xerox Award for the outstanding Ph.D. thesis at Penn State in the area of materials science.

Zhang, who works with Vincent Crespi, Downsbrough Associate Professor of Physics, earned the award for his thesis titled “Theory of Electronic and Structural Properties of Materials: Novel Group-IV Materials and Real-Space Methods.”

A student at Penn State since 1996, Zhang earned his master’s degree at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1996 and his bachelor’s at Xiamen University in 1993.

He is a member of the American Physical Society.

To Science Journal Summer 2001 Index

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