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Two treatment methods enhance chemotherapy by the same means: cellular senescence
Raleigh McElvery
November 10, 2020

In 2019, cancer researchers from MIT found a drug that targeted an elusive molecular interaction previously considered “undruggable.” In so doing, they opened up a new realm of chemotherapy. This drug, called JH-RE-06, sensitized tumors to treatment, but the scientists didn’t fully understand how it exerted its effects. Now, in a pair of studies published in PNAS, the same team is closer to determining which cellular processes this drug alters to enhance cancer therapy.

Many widely-used chemotherapies, like cisplatin, kill tumors by damaging their DNA and inducing programmed cell death. But cells are resilient, and many can continue to function with the help of repair enzymes that simply bypass the damage and continue to replicate the DNA. As a result, some tumors not only defy death, but gain mutations that render them more resistant to treatment or spur new malignancies elsewhere.

“If you’re not making a patient better, it’s very likely you’re making them worse,” says Michael Hemann, associate professor of biology and co-author on both studies. Rather than fully replacing conventional DNA-damaging treatments — which could take decades — Hemann suggests an effective “medium-term” solution: augmenting low doses of cisplatin with safer agents that strengthen the chemotherapy’s tumor-killing capacity.

The team had tested this approach back in 2019, when they first identified JH-RE-06 and saw it enhanced chemotherapy treatment. These experiments revealed that JH-RE-06 bound to an especially shallow (and infamously undruggable) pocket of one DNA repair enzyme called REV1. This barred REV1 from interacting with another key enzyme, and prevented the cancer cells from recovering after cisplatin treatment. But what happened next to cause the tumors to shrink was unclear.

As they began their next round of experiments, the researchers expected to find that the drug would simply enhance the way cisplatin kills tumors via programmed cell death.

Nimrat Chatterjee, Walker’s former postdoc and lead author of the first study, treated mice and individual cells with a combination of cisplatin and JH-RE-06. She expected to see signs of programmed cell death, but for months, she saw no such markers.“We thought that if we blocked the DNA repair process with the JH compound, we’d see more programmed cell death,” says co-author Graham Walker, American Cancer Society Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. “As it turns out, we did see more cell death — just not the kind we were expecting.”

One evening, just as she was about to head home for the day, she peeked through her microscope at the cancer cells treated with JH-RE-06 and cisplatin. She noticed they were fluorescing a strange green color.

“At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing,” she recalls. But after some follow-up, it became clear that the mysterious green color was coming from lipid-containing residues that usually appear as cells age and stop dividing. The cells appeared to be in a permanently dormant state known as senescence — not yet dead but unable to proliferate. JH-RE-06 was altering cisplatin function by triggering a second molecular pathway independent of programmed cell death.

“That was one of the best ‘aha’ moments of my scientific career so far,” Chatterjee says. “REV1, the DNA repair enzyme that JH-RE-06 binds, may have other novel biological functions and a larger role in cancer cell etiology than we originally thought. We’re now grappling with more questions about REV1 than ever before.”

Around the same time, Faye-Marie Vassel PhD ’20, Walker and Hemann’s former joint graduate student and lead author of the second study, witnessed a similar phenomenon in her own experiments. She was investigating a different way of inhibiting the two key DNA repair enzymes that enable cancer cells to survive chemotherapy. Instead of probing JH-RE-06, which latches onto REV1, she tried deleting REV1’s binding partner, called REV7. This protein is particularly influential because it serves an important role in fixing double-stranded breaks in addition to interacting with REV1.

When Vassel deleted REV7 from mice with non-small cell lung cancer, the tumors became more sensitive to cisplatin, as expected. But, like Chatterjee, she saw signs of senescence rather than programmed cell death. The two studies had converged on a common biology: adding JH-RE-06 or deleting REV7 strengthened the effects of cisplatin by inducing this dormant state.

Cancer detection and treatment methods have improved dramatically in the last two decades, but drug-resistant cancers like non-small cell lung cancer remain difficult to combat, Vassel says. “Our experiments are the first to show that senescence induction is likely a consequence of REV7 inhibition,” she adds. “Inhibiting REV7 in tandem with cisplatin therapy may prove to be an effective strategy for enhancing a chemotherapeutic response.”

Chemotherapies that trigger programmed cell death have been the mainstay of cancer treatment for decades. But studies like these show that triggering senescence may be a promising complementary strategy. Most senescent cells are eventually cleared by the immune system, and the researchers suspect this is how cancer cells treated with JH-RE-06 or REV7 inhibitors would be eliminated from the body.

Walker and Hemann agree that, at the moment, their sister studies raise more questions than answers. As Walker explained, “We’ve pried open a new discovery, and hopefully set the stage for many exciting experiments to come.”

Top image: Genetically-engineered mouse model for lung cancer. Credit: Credit: National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. NIH Image Gallery/Flickr (CC BY-NC)
The REV7 image was originally published in: “Structural basis of Rev1-mediated assembly of a quaternary vertebrate translesion polymerase complex consisting of Rev1, heterodimeric polymerase (Pol) ζ, and Pol κ.”
Journal of Biological Chemistry, online August 2, 2012, DOI: 10.1074/jbc.M112.394841
Jessica Wojtaszek, Chul-Jin Lee, Sanjay D’Souza, Brenda Minesinger, Hyungjin Kim, Alan D. D’Andrea, Graham C. Walker, and Pei Zhou.

Citations:
“REV1 inhibitor JH-RE-06 enhances tumor cell response to chemotherapy by triggering senescence hallmarks”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online November 9, 2020, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2016064117
Nimrat Chatterjee , Matthew A Whitman, A Harris , Sophia M Min , Oliver Jonas , Evan C Lien , Alba Luengo , Matthew G Vander Heiden , Jiyong Hong , Pei Zhou , Michael T Hemann , and Graham C Walker 

“Rev7 loss alters cisplatin response and increases drug efficacy in chemotherapy-resistant lung cancer”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online November 3, 2020, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2016067117
Faye-Marie Vassel, Ke Bian, Graham C. Walker, and Michael T. Hemann

Aspiring physician explores the many levels of human health

During her time at MIT, senior Ayesha Ng’s interests have expanded from cellular biology to the social systems that shape public health.

Alison Gold | School of Science
November 9, 2020

It was her childhood peanut allergy that first sparked senior Ayesha Ng’s fascination with the human body. “To see this severe reaction happen to my body and not know what was happening — that made me a lot more curious about biology and living systems,” Ng says.

She didn’t exactly plan it this way. But in her three and a half years at MIT, Ng, a biology and cognitive and brain sciences double major from the Los Angeles, California area, has conducted research and taken classes examining just about every level of human health — from cellular to societal.

Most recently, her passion for medicine and health equity led her to the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where, this summer, she worked to develop guidelines for addressing health disparities on state and local health jurisdictions’ Covid-19 data dashboards. Now, as an aspiring physician amidst the medical school application process, Ng has a sense of how microbiological, physiological, and social systems interact to affect a person’s health.

Starting small

Throughout her entire first year at MIT, Ng studied the biology of health at a cellular level. Specifically, she researched the effects of fasting and aging on regeneration of intestinal stem cells, which are located in the human intestinal crypts and continuously self-divide and reproduce. Understanding these metabolic mechanisms is crucial, as their deregulation can lead to age-associated diseases such as cancer.

“That experience allowed me to broaden my technical skills, just getting used to so many different types of molecular biological techniques right away, which I really appreciated,” Ng says of her time at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Professor David Sabatini’s lab.

“After some time, I realized that I also wanted to also study sciences at a broader, more macro level, instead of only the microbiology and molecular biology that we were studying in Course 7,” Ng says of her biology major.

In addition to studying the biology of cancer, Ng had developed a curiosity about the human brain and how it functions. “I was really interested in that, because my grandpa has dementia,” Ng says.

Seeing her grandfather’s cognitive decline, she was inspired to become involved in MIT BrainTrust, a student organization that offers a social support network for individuals from around the Boston, Massachusetts area who have brain injuries. “We have these meetings, in which I serve as one of only one or two students there to facilitate a safe space where we can have all these individuals with brain injury gather,” Ng says of the peer-support aspect of the program. “They can really share their mutual challenges and experiences.”

Investigating the brain

To pursue her interest in brain research and the societal impact of brain injuries, Ng traveled to the University of Hong Kong the summer after her first year as an MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) China Fung Scholar. Working with Professor Raymond Chang, she began to examine neurodegenerative disease and used tissue-clearing techniques to visualize 3D mouse brain structures at cellular resolution. “That was personally meaningful for me, to research about that and learn more about dementia,” Ng says.

Returning to MIT her sophomore year, Ng was certain that she wanted to continue studying the brain. She began working on Alzheimer’s research at the MIT Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in the lab of Professor Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. Much existing research into Alzheimer’s disease has been at the bulk-tissue level, focusing on the neurons’ role in neurodegeneration associated with aging.

Ng’s work with Tsai considers the complexity of alterations across genes and less-abundant cell types, such as microglia, astrocytes, and other supporting glial cells that become dysregulated in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s. Considering the interplay between and within cell types during neurodegeneration is most intriguing to her. While some molecular processes are protective, other damaging ones simultaneously occur and can exist even within the same cell type. This intricacy has made the mechanistic basis behind Alzheimer’s progression elusive and the research that much more crucial.

“It’s really interesting to see how heterogeneous and complex the responses are in Alzheimer’s brains,” Ng says of the research program with Tsai, a founding director of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative. “I really think about these potential new drug targets to improve treatment for Alzheimer’s in the future because I have seen, with my grandpa especially, how treatment is really lacking in the neurodegeneration field. There’s no treatment that’s been able to stop or even slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Her research project in the Tsai Lab relies on a technology called single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq), which extracts the genomic information contained in individual cells. This is followed by computational dimension reduction and clustering algorithms to examine how Alzheimer’s disease differentially affects genes and specific cell types.

“With that project, we’ve been able to use single-nucleus RNA sequencing to really look at the brains of human Alzheimer’s patients,” Ng says. “And with the single-cell technology, we’re able to look at brain tissue at a much higher resolution, allowing us to see that there’s so much heterogeneity within the brain.”

After conducting more than a year of Alzheimer’s research and then taking a human physiology class in her third year, Ng decided to add a second major in brain and cognitive sciences to gain deeper insight specifically into how the nervous system within the body functions.

“That class really allowed me to realize that I really love organ systems and wanted to study by looking at more physiological mechanisms,” Ng says. “It has been really great to, at the end of my college career, really delve more into a very specific system.”

Medicine and society

Having gained perspective on cellular and microbiology, and human organ systems, Ng decided to zoom out further, interning this past summer at the National Foundation for the CDC. She found the opportunity through MIT’s PKG Center, applied as one of 60 candidates, and was selected for a team of four. There, as a member of the CDC Foundation’s Health Equity Strike Team, she examined how to increase transparency of publicly available Covid-19 data on health disparities and how the narrative tied to health equity can be modified in public health messages. This involved harnessing data about the demographics of those most affected during Covid-19 — including how infection and mortality rates differ starkly based on social factors including housing conditions, socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity.

“Thinking about all these factors, we compiled a set of best practices for how to present data about Covid-19, what data should be collected, and tried to push those out to help jurisdictions as best-practice recommendations,” Ng says. “That did really increase my interest in health equity and made me realize how important public health is as well.”

Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, Ng is spending the first semester of her senior year at home with her family in the Los Angeles area. “I really miss the people and not being able to interact with not only other students and peers, but also faculty as well,” she says. “I really wanted to enjoy time with friends, and just explore more of MIT, too, which I didn’t always get the chance to do over the past few years.”

Still, she continues to participate in both BrainTrust and MIT’s Asian Dance team, remotely, through weekly practices on Zoom.

“I think dance is one of the biggest de-stressors for me; I had never done dance before going to college. Getting to meet this team and join this community allowed me not only to connect to my Asian cultural roots, but also just expose myself to this new art form where I could really learn how to express myself on stage,” Ng says. “And that really has been the source of relief for me to just liberate any worries that I have, and has increased my sense of self-awareness and self-confidence.”

Armed with the many experiences she has enjoyed at MIT, both in and out of the classroom, Ng plans to continue studying both medicine and public health. She’s excited to explore different potential specialties and is currently most intrigued by surgery. Whichever specialty she may choose, she is determined to include health equity and cultural sensitivity in her practice.

“Seeing surgeons, I personally think that being able to physically heal a patient with my own hands, that would be the most rewarding feeling,” Ng says. “I will strive to, as a physician, use whatever platform that I have to advocate for patients and really drive health-care systems to overcome disparities.”

Scientists identify specific brain region and circuits controlling attention
Picower Institute
November 2, 2020

The attentional control that organisms need to succeed in their goals comes from two abilities: the focus to ignore distractions and the discipline to curb impulses. A new study by MIT neuroscientists shows that these abilities are independent, but that the activity of norepinephrine-producing neurons in a single brain region, the locus coeruleus, controls both by targeting two distinct areas of the prefrontal cortex.

“Our results demonstrate a fundamental causal role of LC neuronal activation in the implementation of attentional control by the selective modulation of neural activity in its target areas,” wrote the authors of the study from the research group of Susumu Tonegawa, Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at RIKEN-MIT Laboratory of Neural Circuit Genetics at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Pharmacological and lesion studies of attentional control in humans and other mammals have suggested that norepinephrine-producing, or noradrenergic, neurons in the LC might have this role, but the most convincing evidence has been correlative rather than causal, said study lead author Andrea Bari, a research scientist in the Tonegawa lab. In the new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team demonstrated clear causality by using optogenetics to specifically control LC noradrenergic neurons in mice with temporal and spatial precision as the rodents engaged in three attentional control tasks. The manipulations immediately and reliably impacted the rodents’ performance.

“For the first time we demonstrate that LC activation in real time, with cell-specific techniques causes this effect,” Bari said.

The results, the authors said, could make important contributions to efforts to better understand and treat psychiatric disorders in which attentional control or either of its component abilities is compromised, such as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

“ADHD patients may suffer both distractibility and impulsivity,” said co-author and research scientist Michele Pignatelli “but you can also have cases mainly characterized by inattentive presentation or by hyperactive-impulsive presentation. Perhaps we can conceive new strategies to tackle different types of ADHD.”

Unexpectedly the study also raised new questions about the LC’s role in anxiety, Bari said, because to the team’s surprise, stimulating LC activity also happened to reduce anxiety in the mice.

Locus focus

After establishing their method of taking bidirectional optogenetic control of noradrenergic LC neurons—meaning that with different colors of light they could either stimulate or inhibit activity—the researchers tested the effects of each manipulation in mice. In the first task, the rodents had to wait seven seconds before a half-second flash of light signaled which of two portals they should poke with their nose to get a food reward. Mice in whom LC neurons were optogenetically stimulated did the task correctly more often and made fewer premature moves than when not manipulated. Mice in whom LC neurons were inhibited did the task correctly less often (less attention meant missing that light flash) and jumped the gun more than normal.

The researchers then trained mice on a second behavioral paradigm, derived from the Posner spatial cueing task, widely used in human cognitive neuroscience. In this task, mice before seeing the light that flagged the correct portal (this time for three seconds), they would see a “cue” flash. Sometimes that cue would be on the opposite side, sometimes be in the middle and sometimes be on the correct side. Again, LC stimulation improved correct performance and suppressed impulses and again inhibition reduced correctness and increased impulses, but now the researchers learned something new based on the reaction time of the mice. Stimulated-LC mice showed no difference in reaction time because they were focused on the actual goal but inhibited-LC mice showed variations in reaction time because they were distracted by the cue—when it was on the wrong side they reacted slower than normal and when the cue was on the correct side they reacted faster.

In the third task, the mice were both behaviorally challenged and optogenetically manipulated differently. This time the mice faced the possibility of constant distraction by irrelevant lights while they waited for the actual three-second signal of the food reward location. The same results as before held again, with one exception. In cases where there were no distractors, with three long seconds to notice the signal, inhibited-LC mice did not lapse in performing the task correctly. They only showed the deficit amid distractors.

To truly get at the heart of whether attentional focus and impulse control were independent, or dissociable, the team decided to control LC activity and norepinephrine release not at the main neuron bodies as before, but instead only where their long projections connected to specific areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Going on some of Bari’s prior research and hints from other studies, they targeted the dorso-medial PFC (dmPFC) and the ventro-lateral orbitofrontal cortex (vlOFC). In these experiments they found that stimulating LC connections into the dmPFC increased correct performance but did not reduce premature responses. Meanwhile, stimulating LC connections in the vlOFC did not improve correct performance, but did reduce premature responses.

“Here we have applied behavioral, optogenetic and neural circuit genetic techniques, which afford a high degree of temporal and cell-type specificity for the manipulation and recording of noradrenergic neuron activity in the LC and demonstrate a causal link between temporal-specific LC norepinephrine modulation and attentional control,” the authors wrote. “Our results reveal that the attentional control of behavior is modulated by the synergistic effects of two dissociable coeruleo-cortical pathways, with LC projections to dmPFC enhancing attention and LC projections to vlOFC reducing impulsivity.”

Less anxiety

The tests revealing that LC stimulation reduced anxiety were performed as a precaution. Many studies suggested that increasing LC norepinephrine neuron activity would increase anxiety, Pignatelli said. That could have compromised the willingness of the mice to poke around for their food, or might have made them too impulsive, so the team checked for anxiety effects before beginning the attentional control tasks.

Bari said that investigating the surprising benefit of LC stimulation for anxiety could be an intriguing area for future study. He said he hopes to give it more… attention.

In addition to Tonegawa, Bari and Pignatelli, the paper’s other authors are Sangyu Xu, Daigo Takeuchi, Jiesi Feng, and Yulong Li.

The RIKEN Center for Brain Science, the HHMI, the JPB Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Beijing Brain Initiative supported the study.

Angelika Amon, cell biologist who pioneered research on chromosome imbalance, dies at 53

Professor and mentor for more than 20 years at MIT redefined scientists’ understanding of the biology of cell division and proliferation.

Bendta Schroeder | Koch Institute
October 30, 2020

Angelika Amon, professor of biology and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, died on Oct. 29 at age 53, following a two-and-a-half-year battle with ovarian cancer.

“Known for her piercing scientific insight and infectious enthusiasm for the deepest questions of science, Professor Amon built an extraordinary career – and in the process, a devoted community of colleagues, students and friends,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a letter to the MIT community.

“Angelika was a force of nature and a highly valued member of our community,” reflects Tyler Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT and director of the Koch Institute. “Her intellect and wit were equally sharp, and she brought unmatched passion to everything she did. Through her groundbreaking research, her mentorship of so many, her teaching, and a host of other contributions, Angelika has made an incredible impact on the world — one that will last long into the future.”

A pioneer in cell biology

From the earliest stages of her career, Amon made profound contributions to our understanding of the fundamental biology of the cell, deciphering the regulatory networks that govern cell division and proliferation in yeast, mice, and mammalian organoids, and shedding light on the causes of chromosome mis-segregation and its consequences for human diseases.

Human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but as they divide they can make errors that lead to too many or too few chromosomes, resulting in aneuploidy. Amon’s meticulous and rigorous experiments, first in yeast and then in mammalian cells, helped to uncover the biological consequences of having too many chromosomes. Her studies determined that extra chromosomes significantly impact the composition of the cell, causing stress in important processes such as protein folding and metabolism, and leading to additional mistakes that could drive cancer. Although stress resulting from aneuploidy affects cells’ ability to survive and proliferate, cancer cells — which are nearly universally aneuploid — can grow uncontrollably. Amon showed that aneuploidy disrupts cells’ usual error-repair systems, allowing genetic mutations to quickly accumulate.

Aneuploidy is usually fatal, but in some instances extra copies of specific chromosomes can lead to conditions such as Down syndrome and developmental disorders including those known as Patau and Edwards syndromes. This led Amon to work to understand how these negative effects result in some of the health problems associated specifically with Down syndrome, such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Her expertise in this area led her to be named co-director of the recently established Alana Down Syndrome Center at MIT.

“Angelika’s intellect and research were as astonishing as her bravery and her spirit. Her lab’s fundamental work on aneuploidy was integral to our establishment of the center,” say Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Alana Down Syndrome Center. “Her exploration of the myriad consequences of aneuploidy for human health was vitally important and will continue to guide scientific and medical research.”

Another major focus of research in the Amon lab has been on the relationship between how cells grow, divide, and age. Among other insights, this work has revealed that once cells reach a certain large size, they lose the ability to proliferate and are unable to reenter the cell cycle. Further, this growth contributes to senescence, an irreversible cell cycle arrest, and tissue aging. In related work, Amon has investigated the relationships between stem cell size, stem cell function, and tissue age. Her lab’s studies have found that in hematopoetic stem cells, small size is important to cells’ ability to function and proliferate — in fact, she posted recent findings on bioRxiv earlier this week — and have been examining the same questions in epithelial cells as well.

Amon lab experiments delved deep into the mechanics of the biology, trying to understand the mechanisms behind their observations. To support this work, she established research collaborations to leverage approaches and technologies developed by her colleagues at the Koch Institute, including sophisticated intestinal organoid and mouse models developed by the Yilmaz Laboratory, and a microfluidic device developed by the Manalis Laboratory for measuring physical characteristics of single cells.

The thrill of discovery

Born in 1967, Amon grew up in Vienna, Austria, in a family of five. Playing outside all day with her three younger siblings, she developed an early love of biology and animals. She could not remember a time when she was not interested in biology, initially wanting to become a zoologist. But in high school, she saw an old black-and-white film from the 1950s about chromosome segregation, and found the moment that the sister chromatids split apart breathtaking. She knew then that she wanted to study the inner workings of the cell and decided to focus on genetics at the University of Vienna in Austria.

After receiving her BS, Amon continued her doctoral work there under Professor Kim Nasmyth at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, earning her PhD in 1993. From the outset, she made important contributions to the field of cell cycle dynamics. Her work on yeast genetics in the Nasmyth laboratory led to major discoveries about how one stage of the cell cycle sets up for the next, revealing that cyclins, proteins that accumulate within cells as they enter mitosis, must be broken down before cells pass from mitosis to G1, a period of cell growth.

Towards the end of her doctorate, Amon became interested in fruitfly genetics and read the work of Ruth Lehmann, then a faculty member at MIT and a member of the Whitehead Institute. Impressed by the elegance of Lehmann’s genetic approach, she applied and was accepted to her lab. In 1994, Amon arrived in the United States, not knowing that it would become her permanent home or that she would eventually become a professor.

While Amon’s love affair with  fruitfly genetics would prove short, her promise was immediately apparent to Lehmann, now director of the Whitehead Institute. “I will never forget picking Angelika up from the airport when she was flying in from Vienna to join my lab. Despite the long trip, she was just so full of energy, ready to talk science,” says Lehmann. “She had read all the papers in the new field and cut through the results to hit equally on the main points.”

But as Amon frequently was fond of saying, “yeast will spoil you.” Lehmann explains that “because they grow so fast and there are so many tools, ‘your brain is the only limitation.’ I tried to convince her of the beauty and advantages of my slower-growing favorite organism. But in the end, yeast won and Angelika went on to establish a remarkable body of work, starting with her many contributions to how cells divide and more recently to discover a cellular aneuploidy program.”

In 1996, after Lehmann had left for New York University’s Skirball Institute, Amon was invited to become a Whitehead Fellow, a prestigious program that offers recent PhDs resources and mentorship to undertake their own investigations. Her work on the question of how yeast cells progress through the cell cycle and partition their chromosomes would be instrumental in establishing her as one of the world’s leading geneticists. While at Whitehead, her lab made key findings centered around the role of an enzyme called Cdc14 in prompting cells to exit mitosis, including that the enzyme is sequestered in a cellular compartment called the nucleolus and must be released before the cell can exit.

“I was one of those blessed to share with her a ‘eureka moment,’ as she would call it,” says Rosella Visintin, a postdoc in Amon’s lab at the time of the discovery and now an assistant professor at the European School of Molecular Medicine in Milan. “She had so many. Most of us are lucky to get just one, and I was one of the lucky ones. I’ll never forget her smile and scream — neither will the entire Whitehead Institute — when she saw for the first time Cdc14 localization: ‘You did it, you did it, you figured it out!’ Passion, excitement, joy — everything was in that scream.”

In 1999, Amon’s work as a Whitehead Fellow earned her a faculty position in the MIT Department of Biology and the MIT Center for Cancer Research, the predecessor to the Koch Institute. A full professor since 2007, she also became the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research, associate director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT, a member of the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Her pathbreaking research was recognized by several awards and honors, including the 2003 National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the 2007 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the 2008 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award in Molecular Biology, and the 2013 Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine. In 2019, she won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, and was named to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s annual list of Great Immigrants, Great Americans. This year, she was given the Human Frontier Science Program Nakasone Award. She was also a member of the NAS and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lighting the way forward

Amon’s perseverance, deep curiosity, and enthusiasm for discovery served her well in her roles as teacher, mentor, and colleague. She has worked with many labs across the world and developed a deep network of scientific collaboration and friendships. She was a sought-after speaker for seminars and the many conferences she attended. In over 20 years as a professor at MIT, she has mentored more than 80 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates, and received the School of Science’s undergraduate teaching prize.

“Angelika was an amazing, energetic, passionate, and creative scientist, an outstanding mentor to many, and an excellent teacher,” says Alan Grossman, the Praecis Professor of Biology and head of MIT’s Department of Biology. “Her impact and legacy will live on and be perpetuated by all those she touched.”

“Angelika existed in a league of her own,” explains Kristin Knouse, one of Amon’s former graduate students and a current Whitehead Fellow. “She had the energy and excitement of someone who picked up a pipette for the first time, but the brilliance and wisdom of someone who had been doing it for decades. Her infectious energy and brilliant mind were matched by a boundless heart and tenacious grit. She could glance at any data and immediately deliver a sharp insight that would never have crossed any other mind. Her positive attributes were infectious, and any interaction with her, no matter how transient, assuredly left you feeling better about yourself and your science.”

Taking great delight in helping young scientists find their own “eureka moments,” Amon was a fearless advocate for science and the rights of women and minorities and inspired others to fight as well. She was not afraid to speak out in support of the research and causes she believed strongly in. She was a role model for young female scientists and spent countless hours mentoring and guiding them in a male-dominated field. While she graciously accepted awards for women in science, including the Vanderbilt Prize and the Women in Cell Biology Senior Award, she questioned the value of prizes focused on women as women, rather than on their scientific contributions.

“Angelika Amon was an inspiring leader,” notes Lehmann, “not only by her trailblazing science but also by her fearlessness to call out sexism and other -isms in our community. Her captivating laugh and unwavering mentorship and guidance will be missed by students and faculty alike. MIT and the science community have lost an exemplary leader, mentor, friend, and mensch.”

Amon’s wide-ranging curiosity led her to consider new ideas beyond her own field. In recent years, she has developed a love for dinosaurs and fossils, and often mentioned that she would like to study terraforming, which she considered essential for a human success to life on other planets.

“It was always amazing to talk with Angelika about science, because her interests were so deep and so broad, her intellect so sharp, and her enthusiasm so infectious,” remembers Vivian Siegel, a lecturer in the Department of Biology and friend since Amon’s postdoctoral days. “Beyond her own work in the lab, she was fascinated by so many things, including dinosaurs — dreaming of taking her daughters on a dig — lichen, and even life on Mars.”

“Angelika was brilliant; she illuminated science and scientists,” says Frank Solomon, professor of biology and member of the Koch Institute. “And she was intense; she warmed the people around her, and expanded what it means to be a friend.”

Amon is survived by her husband Johannes Weis, and her daughters Theresa and Clara Weis, and her three siblings and their families.

Mixing mitochondrial biology, mentoring — and doughnuts

Breann Brown works to be honest about the Black experience in academia without scaring talented students away from science.

Leia Dwyer | ASBMB
October 28, 2020

The phrase “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” has a jokey reputation in American education as a hallmark of middle school memorization-based learning. Breann Brown researches the structural biology of protein complexes regulating mitochondrial physiology, and she harks back to that well-worn phrase when she describes herself as, like the mitochondria, “small but mighty.”

As Breann Brown launches her lab during a period of international momentum for the Black Lives Matter movement, she considers the career implications of her identity as a Black woman.

Now an assistant professor in the biochemistry department at Vanderbilt University, Brown states with calm self-assurance, “I’ve always known a career in academia was for me.”

She does not remember a time when she wavered from her goal. She credits both a stubborn streak and the exceptional support of her family and academic mentors along her journey to a career she describes as “vocational.”

Encouraged by her parents, Brown attended an engineering program in high school, which helped kick-start her interest in science. She gained research lab experience during an internship before college, and she says now that such academic experiences and a commitment by colleges and universities to giving back to their local communities through educational opportunities are important because they expose school-age children, especially girls, to careers they might want to explore.

Before landing in Nashville, Brown steadily traveled the East Coast in her academic trajectory. Born and raised in the Washington, D.C., metro area, she attended Duke University as an undergraduate in chemistry and then earned her Ph.D. in molecular pharmacology and physiology in Rebecca Page’s lab at Brown University. Continuing north, she did her postdoctoral training in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Tania Baker. Though she’s excited about her new lab at Vanderbilt, Brown said she misses one thing about the East Coast: the sports culture.

Building a basic research lab

For Brown, athletics and team dynamics translate from the field and court to her vision for building her research lab. She grew up playing team sports, including volleyball and softball, and she takes the same approach to learning skills in sports and research. “Mentorship is coaching,” she said. “I’ll show you how to do it, you’ll practice, you’ll get better and do it on your own.”

Brown arrived at Vanderbilt in 2019, so her lab is still young and growing, as is her role in mentoring her students. She took on her first graduate student in spring 2019 and a research assistant shortly thereafter. “I’m … a first-base coach right now,” she said. “I’ll be more like a third-base coach as my students start getting nearer to graduating.”

Brown describes the theme of her research in structural biology as “proper macromolecular protein complex assembly is critical for maintaining human health” through a variety of cellular processes. Her current focus is on mitochondrial biology and metabolism, an area so complex that “there are lots of avenues to pursue and a lot that we don’t know.”

Brown sees applications of her current work in mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis and strokelike episodes, or MELAS, syndrome, a rare genetic disorder caused by mutations in the mitochondrial DNA. Her lab resides in the division of basic sciences, and she notes that Vanderbilt supports mechanistic and basic science–driven research with the understanding that strong fundamentals must precede developments in downstream applications. Her lab website states that other areas of interest include “assembly mechanisms responsible for regulation of heme biosynthesis, which is altered in several blood diseases, and maintenance of mitochondrial DNA copy number, which has direct implication in proper neuronal development.”

‘A Black woman first’

As Brown launches her lab during a period of international momentum for the Black Lives Matter movement, she actively considers the implications of her identity in her career. “I identify as a Black woman first and foremost,” she said, “and everything else comes after that.”

As many institutions in the U.S. prioritize creating a space for talking about race, Brown believes it is crucial to bring diverse perspectives to these conversations in academia and to move forward with the aim of making concrete changes. She wants to communicate her experience as best she can, she said, and she has reached a point in her career where she is comfortable speaking her mind. She feels a responsibility to represent herself as a Black woman to the next generation of scientists because, she said, “Being a Black woman in science is not easy.”

Brown works to stay true to herself as she develops her voice at Vanderbilt. Her aim is to balance mentoring students, teaching classes, building a lab, representing herself as a Black woman and all the other challenges of academic life in a way that doesn’t turn people off science. “I never walk into lab in a power suit,” she said. “I joke around, and I don’t want to lose that.”

Doing hands-on lab work and troubleshooting is part of what originally drew her to science, and today she goes into the lab as often as she can. She likes the freedom and flexibility she has as an academic to structure her schedule and follow her own path.

Another passion for Brown is finding ways to satisfy her sweet tooth, and she fuels her lab with Nashville’s finest local bakery fare. She searches the city for new bakeries and coffee shops and flexes her chemistry muscles in the kitchen, experimenting with her own pies and cakes. In the race to satisfy her craving, she said, one sweet is leading at the bench: “Our lab is a doughnut lab.”

Amaris Torres-Delgado: biochemist, process development scientist, and salsa dancer

How an MIT Biology alum from Puerto Rico came to love living in Boston

Saima Sidik
October 27, 2020

Even as a kid, Amaris Torres-Delgado PhD ’16 was analytical. “I wanted to be fact-based,” she says. “Once I had the facts, I’d speak with conviction.” As a result, her family wasn’t surprised that she decided to earn a PhD from MIT Biology, then apply for jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. Now, she works as a process development scientist at Amgen, where she uses her analytical skills to optimize drug production.

Torres-Delgado grew up in Puerto Rico, and the people, mindsets — and even the food — that she encountered in Cambridge, Massachusetts were unfamiliar at first. But after a decade of living in the Boston area, Torres-Delgado has come to love her new home, and she embraces the diversity of people and scientific problems she encounters.

Young child sitting on stairs
Even as a young child, Torres-Delgado was curious and analytical. Here she is at age three, on her first day of school. Credit: Escuela Josefita Monserrate de Selles

In high school, Torres-Delgado considered becoming either a medical doctor or a lawyer. But because Torres-Delgado loves problem solving, her mother suggested that she consider becoming a scientist instead. This advice led her to earn a bachelor’s degree in industrial biotechnology from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. The drug company Amgen helped create this degree program in order to train future employees for its Puerto Rican branch. Torres-Delgado found the program to be an exciting opportunity to learn a combination of biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering, as well as a doorway into a meaningful career in the pharmaceutical industry.

During college, Torres-Delgado spent a summer working in Tania Baker’s lab as part of the MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (MSRP-Bio). “The mentorship I received was wonderful,” she says, and so when she was accepted to the MIT Biology Graduate Program, she didn’t hesitate to return, and she opted to stay in the Baker lab.

Being more than a thousand miles from home left Torres-Delgado feeling lonely, but fortunately, another Puerto Rican graduate student introduced her to a new hobby: salsa dancing. “We’d go to socials at the different salsa schools around Boston,” Torres-Delgado says. With this new community, she started to feel less homesick.

In the lab, Torres-Delgado became captivated by a protein degradation machine that others in the Baker lab were studying. Cells use these wood-chipper-like machines to regulate protein levels, and a component of this machine called ClpS carries proteins to the site where they’re destroyed. Strikingly, ClpS speeds up the degradation of some kinds of proteins and slows down the degradation of others, but no one had been able to figure out why. Although other Baker lab members told Torres-Delgado that the ClpS mystery would be tricky to solve, she was determined to crack this cold case.

By the end of her PhD, she’d discovered that, in addition to delivering proteins to the degradation machine, ClpS sits on the same machine and makes it work less efficiently. Carrying certain proteins to the machine speeds up their degradation, but sitting on the machine slows down degradation of incoming proteins.

Although she enjoyed learning biochemistry in the Baker lab, Torres-Delgado says, “I’ve always been excited about pharmaceutical work that goes on close to the patient.” Her original plan was to return to Puerto Rico after earning her doctorate in order to work as an industry scientist there, but when she finished her PhD, she felt like she wasn’t done exploring Boston.

Torres-Delgado and her PhD advisor, Tania Baker. Credit: Juan E. Parra

She took a job at Vertex Pharmaceuticals with a group that oversaw manufacturing of the company’s first drug based on a biological molecule. While many drugs are produced through chemical reactions, this drug was produced in living cells, and Torres-Delgado was part of the team that supervised this new area of drug production. The biochemistry she’d learned during her PhD gave her the scientific background to provide valuable insight, but Torres-Delgado had a lot to learn about the process of efficiently producing a high-quality drug, and her industry colleagues helped her pick up the new skills she needed.

“I learned these skills on the job, from my peers, and this way of learning is something that’s available and encouraged,” she says. “You don’t have to be super focused on your long-term career goals during your training.” She’s since moved to Amgen’s Cambridge branch, where she works in process development as part of their oncology division.

Ten years after leaving her childhood home in Puerto Rico, Torres-Delgado still doesn’t feel like she’s finished living in Boston. She moved north at an impressionable point in her life, at a time when minority rights were gaining traction, and the people and philosophies she found in Boston have impacted her world view substantially.

“As a young adult, I wanted to experience a way of living that differed from how I grew up,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much more there is to the world until I moved to Boston. Here, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about other religions, other cultures, people from the whole gender spectrum — even understanding that there is a gender spectrum was a new experience.”

Torres-Delgado also finds diversity in her job, which includes a variety of tasks like figuring out how to optimize a manufacturing process, making sure Amgen meets regulatory standards, and mentoring other scientists. Underlying all these skills is the same analytical mindset that she started developing back in Puerto Rico and built on at MIT — it’s all about leveraging the facts.

Posted 10.22.20
Top photo: Amaris Torres-Delgado/Ammar Arsiwala
Tyler Jacks, founding director of MIT’s Koch Institute, to step down

A search committee chaired by Institute Professor Phillip Sharp will work to identify a new director for the MIT’s pioneering cancer research center.

Bendta Schroeder | Koch Institute
October 26, 2020

The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer center, has announced that Tyler Jacks will step down from his role as director, pending selection of his successor.

“An exceptionally creative scientist and a leader of great vision, Tyler also has a rare gift for launching and managing large, complex organizations, attracting exceptional talent and inspiring philanthropic support,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “We are profoundly grateful for all the ways he has served MIT, including most recently his leadership on the Research Ramp Up Lightning Committee, which made it possible for MIT’s research enterprise to resume in safe ways after the initial Covid shutdown. I offer warmest admiration and best wishes as Tyler steps down from leading the Koch and returns full time to the excitement of the lab.”

Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology, has served as director for more than 19 years, first for the MIT Center for Cancer Research (CCR) and then for its successor, the Koch Institute. The CCR was founded by Nobel laureate Salvador Luria in 1974, shortly after the federal government declared “war on cancer,” with the mission of unravelling the molecular core of cancer. Jacks became the center’s fourth director in 2001, following Luria, Nobel laureate and Institute Professor Phillip Sharp, and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research Richard Hynes.

Aided by the championship of then-MIT President Susan Hockfield and a gift of $100 million from MIT alumnus David H. Koch ’62, SM ’63, Jacks oversaw the evolution of the Center for Cancer Research into the Koch Institute in 2007 as well as the construction of a new home in Building 76, completed in 2010. The Koch Institute expands the mission of its predecessor by bringing life scientists and engineers together to advance understanding of the basic biology of cancer, and to develop new tools to better diagnose, monitor, and treat the disease.

Under the direction of Jacks, the institute has become an engine of collaborative cancer research at MIT. “Tyler’s vision and execution of a convergent cancer research program has propelled the Koch Institute to the forefront of discovery,” notes Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research.

Bolstered by the Koch Institute’s associate directors Jacqueline Lees, Matthew Vander Heiden, Darrell Irvine, and Dane Wittrup, Jacks oversaw four successful renewals of the coveted NCI-designated cancer center stature, with the last two renewals garnering perfect scores. In 2015, Jacks was the recipient of the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the MIT faculty can bestow upon one of its members, for his leadership in cancer research and for his role in establishing the Koch Institute.

“Tyler Jacks turned the compelling idea to accelerate progress against cancer by bringing together fundamental biology, engineering know-how, and clinical expertise, into the intensively collaborative environment that is now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research,” says Hockfield. “His extraordinary leadership has amplified the original idea into a paradigm-changing approach to cancer, which now serves as a model for research centers around the world.”

To support cross-disciplinary research in high-impact areas and expedite translation from the bench to the clinic, Jacks and his colleagues shepherded the creation of numerous centers and programs, among them the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, the Swanson Biotechnology Center, the Lustgarten Lab for Pancreatic Cancer Research, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative. In addition, Jacks has co-led the Bridge Project, a collaboration between the Koch Institute and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center that brings bioengineers, cancer scientists, and clinical oncologists together to solve some of the most challenging problems in cancer research. Jacks has raised nearly $375 million in support of these efforts, as well as the building of the Koch Institute facility, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, and other activities.

Jacks first became interested in cancer as a Harvard University undergraduate while attending a lecture by Robert Weinberg, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and member of the Whitehead Institute, who is himself a pioneer in cancer genetics. After earning his PhD at the University of California at San Francisco under the direction of Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, Jacks joined Weinberg’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. He joined the MIT faculty in 1992 with appointments in the Center for Cancer Research and the Department of Biology.

Jacks is widely considered a leader in the development of engineered mouse models of human cancers, and has pioneered the use of gene-targeting technology to construct mouse models and to study cancer-associated genes in mice. Strains of mice developed in his lab are used by researchers around the world, as well as by neighboring labs within the Koch Institute. Because these models closely resemble human forms of the disease, they have allowed researchers to track how tumors progress and to test new ways to detect and treat cancer. In more recent research, Jacks has been using mouse models to investigate how immune and tumor cells interact during cancer development and how tumors successfully evade immune recognition. This research is expected to lead to new immune-based therapies for human cancer.

Outside his research and MIT leadership, Jacks co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Panel for the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, chaired the National Cancer Advisory Board of the National Cancer Institute, and is a past president of the American Association for Cancer Research. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jacks serves on the Board of Directors of Amgen and Thermo Fisher Scientific. He is also a co-founder of T2 Biosystems and Dragonfly Therapeutics, serves as an advisor to several other companies, and is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.

Sharp will lead the search for the next director of the Koch Institute, with guidance from noted leaders in MIT’s cancer research community, including Hockfield and Hynes, as well as Angela M. Belcher, head of the Department of Biological Engineering and Jason Mason Crafts Professor; Paula T. Hammond, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and David H. Koch Professor of Engineering; Amy Keating, professor of biology; Robert S. Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor; and David M. Sabatini, Professor of Biology and member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

“Jacks is a renowned scientist whose personal research has changed the prevention and treatment of cancer,” says Sharp. “His contributions to the creation of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and his leadership as its inaugural director have also transformed cancer research at MIT and nationally. By integrating engineers and cancer biologists into a community that shares knowledge and skills, and collaborates with clinical scientists and the private sector, this convergent institute represents the future of biological research in the MIT style.”

After Jacks steps down, he will continue his research in the areas of cancer genetics and immune-oncology and his teaching, while also stewarding the Bridge Project into its second decade.

“It has been a privilege for me to serve as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research and the Koch Institute for the past two decades and to work alongside many of the brightest minds in cancer research,” says Jacks. “The Koch Institute is a powerhouse of research and innovation, and I look forward to the next generation of leadership in this very special place.”

Bench, bath and beyond

Transform your apartment into a yeast lab, and have fun doing it!

Grad Admissions Blog | Veda K.
October 22, 2020
One of the very first lessons you learn in microbiology is that while countless things can – and will – go wrong, you can almost always count on your microbes to grow. There is some strange comfort in knowing that what looks like clear liquid today will reveal countless gleaming colonies smiling up at you from your petri dish tomorrow. This radical assurance of growth transforms the many tedious tasks of lab work into an almost meditative experience. Pouring, plating, streaking — these could easily be yoga poses in the clinically sterile studio of a BSL-2 lab[1].

When the pandemic-that-shall-not-be-named abruptly separated me from my work this March, I threatened to bring the lab home. Unsurprisingly, my roommates were far from enthused at the idea of me culturing human pathogens in our garage. Somewhere in-between trying to bribe them with beer and baked goods I realized I could turn my scientific focus on an organism far more delicious than MRSA[2]: yeast!

Yeast, the tiny organism so miraculous that it was known as “godisgoode” in the days before microscopes were invented, is behind the magical transformations that give us beer, wine, sourdough, doughnuts, kombucha — you name it. In our technological times, it is tempting to relegate the study of microbes to sterile, fluorescently-lit, strictly controlled labs where the genetically engineered organisms you order off the internet live pampered lives. In quarantine in my own home, I re-discovered a centuries-old truth: yeast will appear and grow anywhere. Like any good pet, yeast are largely well-behaved and will sit, stand, and shake your hand on command. Disclaimer: they may also bubble over and stain your carpet in unsavory ways.

With a bit of intuition and a lot of patience, you too can transform any apartment into a lab to grow your pet yeast in!

The kitchen: your new bench

Sourdough: needy but delicious

Growing your own sourdough starter is a relatively low-effort process that is not only ridiculously easy, it also lends you serious kitchen clout. All you need to get started are flour, water, and the right temperature. Combine the flour and water in equal quantities in a container with quite a bit of headspace. “Feed” your starter once a day by replacing half of it by weight with a fresh water-flour mixture. Grow your starter at 68-75F. In the cold of the winter, yeast will take longer to grow and consume the complex nutrients in flour. In the summer, your starter may be so active it requires “feeding” twice a day!

 A young starter with “hooch” on top

As the complex community develops in your starter, it will go from being watery (the liquid on top is actually called “hooch”, if that is any indication of its actual nature) and frankly pretty stinky to bubbly and aromatic. Your nose and eyes are your best tools for judging what bugs are living in your starter (move over, Illumina[3]!). Fuzzy and white? Probably mould! Orange and cheesey? Serratia marcescens is likely the culprit. Simply use a clean spoon to remove these offending species. The wonderful magic of your starter is that, as a living community of wild yeasts and bacteria, it will eventually fend off nastier invaders and reach a set-point of well-behaved yeast. Patience is crucial! Keep feeding, and believe in “godisgoode”.

As a microbiologist, I must admit that the process of developing a working starter far outweighed the actual bread-baking process. For those of you who are excited about baking – the starter can be used for pancakes, doughnuts, muffins, cake, almost any dessert that uses dry active yeast. When you need a break from your prolific baking streak, simply pop your starter in the freezer and it’ll be ready for the next time you get hungry!

Beer: hurry up and wait

Over our many weeks in confinement, my roommates and I have been refining our beer-tasting palates by attending Lamplighter Brewery’s virtual tasting events. The wonderful folks at lamp gave me my first introduction to how beer is made and, eager to fill my weekends with more than just existential dread, I decided to venture into brewing.

To be completely honest, I’d also been missing those $6 pitchers of High Life at the Muddy (the Muddy Charles Pub, a campus highlight).

Like baking, brewing is a process that has engendered a cult-following. Homebrewers take their craft seriously, and you can find countless blog posts and youtube videos describing everything from sanitization techniques to pitch rates (how much yeast goes in) to heated debates on hop flavor profiles. To an MIT grad student, drinking from this “firehose” of information should feel almost comfortable, if you can withstand the flashbacks to 7.51 (principles of biochemical analysis). The trick, I’ve learned, is to dive in headfirst and take in specific pieces of information only as needed.

Brewing requires a little more investment than baking. The equipment you need will likely not be lying around the house, and unfortunately cannot be repurposed for much if you find that brewing isn’t quite your thing. The good news is that there are several companies selling pre-assembled “kits” to get you started on your boozy journey. After doing some research of my own, and soliciting advice from my homebrewer friends, I went with an IPA kit that included most of the hardware I’d need.

My first (and only, so far) brew day was a 6-hour process. Like any experiment in the lab, I anxiously sanitized, scrubbed, stirred, heated and cooled alternately. The day after, I realized my hyper-aware level of caution had been superfluous – my yeast were happily bubbling away in their preferred temperature range of 68F-75F. Little did I know that they’d still be bubbling away two weeks later at 91F (!!), thanks to the heat of a Boston summer and a failed condenser in our central AC.

The garage: your new incubator / engineering lab

Once your beer has been brewed, it needs to ferment in a cool, dark place for two weeks. The only cool, dark place in our now very hot apartment is our garage, which has been taken over by my MechE roomie (hey Annie!) Annie, not constrained by a study of deadly bacteria, was uninhibited in her assembly of a mini-engineering lab in our garage, even having equipment sent directly to our apartment! My yeast and fermenting beer join her assorted selection of wires in filling the void in our hearts normally filled by our labs.

Sourdough starter fed and beer bottled, all that is left to do is wait. In between waiting for bread and booze, I like to sneak in some studying for my upcoming qualifying exams!

As we become ever more intimately acquainted with our homes and the yeast that inhabit them, I highly encourage you to experience the magic of micro-organismal life for yourself. Biting into that first slice of bread or taking your first sip of home-brewed beer is a fulfilling reminder that, but for the pardoning mercy of an only 99.99% effective clorox wipe, our sterile world would be dull and flat. Grant yourself a moment to breathe and celebrate the 0.01% of microbes that make our world wonderful — you’ll be back in the lab in no time!

[1] Biosafety level 2 (BSL-2)refers to  laboratories that work with biological agents that pose a moderate health hazard

[2] Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) is a form of antibiotic resistant bacteria that causes infections

[3] Illumina is a DNA sequencing company that is well known for its technology