Four Island Pacific Academy seniors were part of a research team gathering data for the study of a rare lung disease and their efforts will be included in an upcoming science publication.
(UPDATE February 5, 2016: Read the scientific paper here in the FEMS Microbiology Letters.)
During the summer of 2015, IPA’s seniors Aleena Alop-Mabuti, Jackson Button, Jaycinth Hitzeman, and Kasey Nunies were part of an exciting scientific study in conjunction with the University of Colorado and another International Baccalaureate (IB) high school in Colorado. Their focus: a lung disease that occurs only in Hawaii caused by the growth of a certain mycobacterium. A team of graduate research students at the University of Colorado sought to find out why the mycobacteria only grow here.
The IPA students, as well as the IB students in Colorado, collected raw data for the study. Both student groups were supplied with showerheads to install in various places in and around where they lived. The data they later collected would help to support or disprove a theory that the mycobacterium’s growth on the showerheads which then became aerosol when the showers were turned on was what caused people to contract the disease.
Seniors Hitzeman and Button place petri dishes into an incubator in IPA’s high school biology lab.
Each group took swabs of the showerheads, plated these samples onto petri dishes, and then incubated them at the appropriate temperature. They also conducted water quality tests, such as pH. The data (and bacterial samples) were sent to the University of Colorado, where the research team analyzed the data. The Colorado high school students’ data was used as the “control” sample providing a comparison to the Hawaii samples.
The study manuscript has been forwarded to the Oxford University Press for publication in the scientific journal FEMS Microbiology Letters. (FEMS is the acronym for the Federation of European Microbiological Societies.)
All four of the IPA seniors are college bound with various fields of study in mind. Alop-Mabuti will be taking pre-medicine courses; Hitzeman and Nunies plan to major in biology; Button is concentrating on mechanical engineering and business. Being published while still in high school is an achievement sure to be noticed by colleges and universities. Congratulations to IPA’s first published students.
The title of the paper to be published is “Comparing the temporal colonization and microbial diversity of showerhead biofilms in Hawai’i and Colorado.” The credited group of authors include: Abe, Jonathan; Alop-Mabuti, Aleena; Burger, Peyton; Button, Jackson; Ellsberry, Madeline; Hitzeman, Jaycinth; Morgenstern, David; Nunies, Kasey; Strother, Mara; Darling-Munson, Jared; Chan, Yvonne; Cassady, Robert; Vasconcellos, Sarah; Iseman, Michael; Chan, Edward; Honda, Jennifer.
