Amélie Mwilambwe spent a lot of time with bees this past summer. The Illinois State student’s home away from home was a red-lit laboratory in the Felmley Hall of Science Annex where she raised hundreds of bumblebees on different diets as part of Dr. Ben Sadd’s research team. In an adjacent lab, she examined, dissected, and froze the specimens to study how the microbes in the bees’ guts change and how this affected their health.
Next door in Moulton Hall, fellow student Lylia Gomez spent the summer in front of a computer crunching code and reading academic journals. She has been examining the neurobiology of why tiny worms, known scientifically as C. elegans, move based on temperature changes in their environment.
Appears InOne thing the budding scholars have in common—in addition to inquisitive minds—is that they were among five freshmen or sophomores, out of 23 total awardees, who received summer 2023 Faculty-mentored Independent Research Experiences (FIREbird) research grants from the Office of Student Research (OSR). Both students are now juniors who began their research last school year.
“Having undergraduates start research in their sophomore year gives them time for considerable growth, which benefits the students but also the research group they are part of, as they develop into critically thinking and independent scientists,” said Sadd, professor of infectious disease ecology. “I always fully immerse them in our whole group, including graduate students and postdocs, and they bring energy and fresh ideas.”
The grant program, in its fourth year, pays undergraduate students up to $3,000 to focus on their research throughout the less busy summer months. Mwilambwe and Gomez were grateful to have this support, which allowed them to cut back on their summer jobs and focus on their projects.
“Many times, students just don’t have dedicated time for research, and research takes time,” said OSR Director Gina Hunter. “They have this money to support them in doing this research and using their time to do the research.”
Research early in a student’s career can help them figure out what degree they would like to pursue, Hunter said. That was the case for both Mwilambwe and Gomez, who are in the process of switching into biological sciences and physics, respectively, from different majors.
“A lot of times students know that they might be interested in a field, like chemistry or agronomy, but really getting into how knowledge is created in that field can spark interest and can help them get really a lot more specific about what they would like to do,” Hunter said.
Neuroscience of worms
Gomez became interested in biophysics and computational neuroscience research during a freshman class with her mentor, Physics Professor Dr. Epaminondas Rosa Jr. She began researching under him last school year and presented at the University Research Symposium in the spring, as a precursor to her current project, titled “Mathematical Modeling for Thermoreception in C. elegans.”
Rosa likes working with early undergraduates and seeing how they evolve as they delve deeper into the research. “I learn a lot from them because they ask questions that I don’t ask anymore. They ask the basic, fundamental questions, which are the most important, and that keeps me focused.” Rosa also acknowledges fruitful collaboration with the lab of Dr. Andrés Vidal-Gadea, from the School of Biological Sciences, where experiments with living worms are performed.
Gomez is using computer modeling to study the relationship between two neurons that are known to be temperature sensitive.
“The question my research is asking is what’s the mechanism that allows these neurons in C. elegans to take in the temperature around them and induce a certain motor output,” Gomez said. “If the worms are placed at a warmer temperature, they’ll move back to where they’re comfortable, and then the same thing at cooler temperatures. Unless it goes too low, then they won’t move at all. So we know this, but we don’t know why or what the mechanism is that leads them back to the comfortable temperature.”
C. elegans make good neuroscience animal models because they have only 302 neurons, all of which have been mapped. Rosa explained. In comparison, the human brain has billions of neurons.
“C. elegans are still complex enough organisms that we can relate them back to humans,” Gomez said. “So much research in this area is related back to neurological disorders, and so even though my project isn’t directly finding answers to those things right now, it could help in the future.”
“I truly have enjoyed the research and have an elevated sense of confidence in my abilities entering junior year as well as in my pursuit of graduate school.”
Lylia Gomez
Rosa said there may be climate change implications to the research, as well. “If animals that are used to certain temperatures can’t migrate to environments at temperatures that make them comfortable, how are they going to be able to survive? So what Lylia is doing right now is studying how those little animals react to differences in temperature, and what she’s doing can be applicable not only to the worms, which are important, but also to other animals because the underlying mechanisms might be similar.”
Working on the project has taught Gomez how to navigate complicated academic papers in this research area and developed her computational skills. She plans to continue with this project as an upper-class student. She hopes to publish a paper on her findings and present them at an academic conference. Eventually, she would like to pursue a doctorate in biophysics.
“I truly have enjoyed the research and have an elevated sense of confidence in my abilities entering junior year as well as in my pursuit of graduate school,” Gomez said.
Bees’ bellies
Mwilambwe’s project is the outgrowth of the Sadd lab’s research into the ecological and evolutionary interactions between host organisms and both pathogenic and beneficial microbes.
“Amélie’s work builds on previous work in our bumblebee model system, adding how what they eat determines the beneficial bacteria they carry and what this means for their health,” Sadd said. “In addition to this being a model system for understanding host and gut microbe interactions, Amélie’s and our other work has a conservation angle too, with bumblebees being important but threatened pollinators in natural and agricultural areas.”
For her project, Mwilambwe has been raising colonies of hundreds of bumblebees, which were started from queens collected in Central Illinois with the permission of the ParkLands Foundation. She has separated the bees to test how different diets, with varying nutrition, affect important gut microbes and the bees’ health.
“These different diets have different nutritional ratios that can affect the structure of the gut microbial communities in the bee,” she said. “I really wanted to study the relationship between diet and the gut microbes. So what type of pollen in their environment do they have access to? And how does that affect these beneficial microbes that help them survive? That is the question my project is aiming at answering.”
Just like Gomez’s worms, Mwilambwe’s bumblebees make for good research subjects due to their bodies’ relative simplicity.
“I originally was interested in this research from a human perspective, but given that humans have over two thousand types of bacteria in their gut, it is very difficult to study the many different factors that play into how our diet may affect our gut microbes and then our bodies. But the bees only have about 10 to 15 core gut microbes, making it easier to pick up patterns.”
Through this project Mwilambwe has gained important experience in working through the entire scientific process and managing all the steps of the research so that she can get valid results. “I have all these samples that I need to collect. They’re all on different schedules. For example, I collect and give pollen diets to bees today. But tomorrow, I need to take those bees out and freeze them to analyze their microbes and process their pollen diet to know how much they have eaten. So you have a bunch of different schedules to manage as well making sure your testing subjects are OK.”
In addition to the mentoring of Sadd, Mwilambwe has benefited from collaborating with Dr. Logan Sauers, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a member of the research team who helped teach her lab techniques and about research opportunities like the FIREbird grant. “He’s been instrumental in really guiding me and helping me think through my career goals and aspirations.”
Like Gomez, Mwilambwe is hoping to publish her research and eventually enter graduate school.
“It’s really advantageous to be a younger student doing research because I have more time to gain experience in the lab,” she said. “Given that my project goes well, I could possibly have a paper out with my authorship on it. This would help make my application for a master’s program more competitive, thus opening more doors for future research opportunities.”
The Office of Student research offers grant funding to undergraduate and graduate students throughout the year. To financially support student research, donate to the Student Research and Innovation Fund at Giving.IllinoisState.edu.
