Welcome to the Sci Files, an Impact 89 FM series that explores student research here at Michigan State University. We're your co hosts, Marty Dowling.
And Dimitri Joseph.
Next, we have Rose Quitan Lundquist with us. Hi, Rose. Thank you for joining us. Could you tell us a little
bit about what your research is? Yes. I am, studying apple food microbiomes. And so I am looking at how the microbiota these are the community of microorganisms living in a particular environment. And from my study, it's apple fruit and how these organisms are changing over time during both side of storage. And I'm also looking at how the immune response of the apple fruit impacts the microbiota composition and the health of the apple food.
Very cool research. What is the immune response like in an apple?
Right? Yeah. A lot of people, when I say apple fruit as immune response, they're like, what? So they get so surprised. So, yeah, we found out that apple fruit that is already detached from the apple plant has an immune response.
So they have this innate immunity and this innate immunity, they found out that it can recruit beneficial microbes in order to maintain a healthy microbiome. So I wanted to look at if apple fruit has that innate immunity as well. And we found that that apple fruit has innate immunity and this innate immunity collapses over time. And so my hypothesis is that this innate immunity collapsing over time has an impact on the microbiota and also the health of the apple.
When I think of innate immunity, I think of the human's innate immunity, and I think of the skin. Is the apple skin that innate immunity that collapses over time, or are you referring to something else?
Right. Yeah. So innate immunity, it's like the human innate immunity, except that this innate immunity is in the apple cell. It don't just have to be on the skin but on, like, all over the apple. Apple is made of cells. Right? So the cells in the plasma membrane, they have these receptors. It's called receptor genes. And then these receptor genes, when they recognize microbes pamtetraglut triggered immunity. It's also called PTI.
And this is the innate immunity, and this is the first line of defense. And after that, there are so many things happening, but that's the first line of defense. I'm saying that in a very simplified form.
Yeah. Yeah. In order for me to understand that. So I I thank
you. It's a good explanation. And what are some of the bacteria that comprise the microbiome, good or bad, of an apple?
Good question. I looked at both fungi and also bacteria. And in bacteria, there are all these well known, like, people call it, goryl microbiota. So those are present in most of the plants like Pseudomonas, Fingominas, and Metellobacterium, and all of this. Or Enralstonia.
Well known plant bacterias are there. And also among fungi, you would see fungi like Alternaria and spiropolomyces. And Alternaria is a well known, well studied pathogen fungi that causes rot. And so this Alternaria, the relative abundance increases over time and you see them a lot in, rotten apple fruit, but you don't see them so much in a healthy apple fruit. Okay.
Interesting. So when an apple starts to, quote unquote, go bad and starts to turn mushy
or brown, that's because of the innate immunity of the apple going down and there's increased prevalence of these microbiomes? So that's my hypothesis. And so this is just, like, the beginning of, the research. This is where we are finding out that, yes, apple has innate immunity and it collapses over time, and also the microbiome is changing over time. So that's my hypothesis that innate immunity has an impact on the microbiota, and also the microbiota has an impact on the immunity.
And they are cross talking to each other. And that one is the cause and the consequences. It's like they need each other to have a healthy apple fruit. And so this opens up a lot of different research in the future where we can study what these microbes are doing for the health of the fruit. And, also, we can study on inducing the immune response of the apple fruit and see how does that change the microbiome and health. And so it opens a lot of doors with the research that I
am doing. Yeah. So it sounds like you're not just looking at harmful bacteria, but also possibly helpful bacterias.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, I am looking at everything. What's in there? Like, both beneficial, harmful, pathogenic, opportunistic, everything that's in there. Like, what's what's in there? What kind of microbes in there that I am looking at? But then the next step would be, like, screening which are the beneficial ones and which are the harmful and opportunistic ones. So that will be the next step.
Has there been research done before classifying or looking at what kind of bacteria are on the apple?
Yeah. Using amplicon sequencing, just identifying what's in there. That they have been done, like, but in a different research, in a different settings, quite different from mine. But so far, nobody new step. Yeah. Sounds like a cool project. Yeah. So a very interesting next new step.
Yeah. Sounds like a cool project. Yeah.
This may not be under your expertise, but do you have any tips on maintaining apples?
From my experience, I would say that don't keep it in high humidity because high humidity, it's good for the better term. So it's like
you you
don't wanna keep them in a humidity, you know, direct sunlight. So keep it in, like, shade, and don't keep
it wet. Yeah. I actually honestly never really even thought about the apples going bad as being a result of the microbiota of the apple. So it's really interesting to hear, and I hope we get to learn more in the future. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you.
Next, we have Ifani Chuku Eke here with us to discuss his research. Thank you for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit about what your research is?
Oh, yes. So I'm a here, PhD candidate in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. Recently, we got rebranded as microbiology, genetics, and immunology. My research is on drug discovery for tuberculosis. So my PI, Robert Abramovich, we are big on drug discovery for tuberculosis, how to shorten the treatment regimen, how to discover more effective drugs that can be used to treat tuberculosis.
You just mentioned a very interesting reason for your research, which is that the current treatment duration for mycobacterium tuberculosis is very long. Could you just give us some information about how long the treatment process is for for TB?
So, it depends on the type of TB you are diagnosed with. So, most times for normal TB, it takes a minimum of 6 months 6 months. To treat. But if you have what we call multi drug resistant tuberculosis, in that case, that is tuberculosis resistant to 2 first line drugs that are used in treating tuberculosis. So these 2 first line drugs are asoniazine and rifampicin.
In that case, you need minimum of 2 years to treat tuberculosis. Then we have the extra, one that can even take a a longer time to treat. So it depends on the kind of tuberculosis that you have depending on the resistance.
Compared to the current regimen that's prescribed for TB, what are some of the findings that you've had in terms of new potential drugs that might work against they
take a long time to work. That's why we had that 6 months. I've been they take a long time to work. That's why we had that 6 months minimum for their efficacy to be seen. So one of the things that we are trying to do in our lab is to shorten the treatment regimen from 6 months to 3 months.
One of the things that drive that long treatment duration for tuberculosis is because when mycobacterium tuberculosis affects the human host, it mostly affect the macrophages, the macrophages in the lung. And there in the lung, one of the ways the body tends to fight against it is to form what we call a glomerular. A glomerular is a protective lesion that encapsulates the pathogenic bacteria, preventing it from disseminating to different regions of the body. So that's like a double a sword. One, it enables it prevents the bacteria from affecting all the organs of the body, but that also makes it very hard to treat the bacteria because most drugs are unable to penetrate that protective lesion.
So we are looking at the way to specifically target m t b inside that current loma. So that's one of the things, we have actually discovered in our work. We have been able to show that how some of our compounds are able to kill MGP inside its dormant state. So inside that glioma, it tends to form a dormant state. So we are able to show that our compound is able to queue macrophathromic tuberculosis in this dormant
stage. So from what I'm hearing, one of the unique things about TB is that it's consumed by macrophages or alveolar macrophages and then the body tries to protect against it. Yeah. So this is protective reaction that encases the tuberculosis cells, and you found a way of penetrating this protective case?
Basically, in that protective case in the lung, MTD tends to go into a strictly aerobic organism. It needs oxygen for survival. Strictly aerobic organism. It needs oxygen for survival. But inside that protective case, there's low Okay?
And one of the ways m tb 3 reacts to the low oxygen is to form a dormant state. That's what we call a non replicating persistent state dormant state. So that dormant state is characterized by minimal replication, minimal transcription, minimal cell metabolic activities. So nothing much is happening there is akin to the bacteria sleeping. Most drugs in the market target a metabolic activity.
For example, which is one of the first nine drugs for treating tuberculosis, targets my colleague acid synthesis. So my colleague acid is a major cell wall component of macropathyroid tuberculosis. So it mostly targets synthesis, and with that, it kills the bacteria. Another drug targets transcription, and that's how it's able to kill. Now if the bacteria is sleeping and is not undergoing some of this metabolic activity, those strokes that take those those metabolic activities are useless.
So what we have been able to show is that not necessarily penetrating. We have not reached that level of chitung and loma penetration, but we we have been able to show that our compound can cure dormant NTB that is normally found in the glioma. So we are yet to show glioma penetration, but we are able to show it can cure dormant antibody.
Well, thank you, Ify, for letting us know or making us more aware that you and your team have identified a drug that can target mycobacterium tuberculosis in its dormant state, which most drugs do not currently do. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having me here.
Next, we have Simon Sanchez with us to his research. Hi, Simon. Thank you for joining us. Would you give us an intro of what your research entails?
Yeah. Thank you for having me. So my research entails using insects to detect cancer. And the way you can think about this is the way we use dogs to detect bombs or to detect drugs. Dogs can also be trained to detect cancer.
But the problem with dogs is that we rely on their behavioral response. So that behavioral response is a yes or no. And there's a lot of information that's happening in the brain that's being processed that we really don't take advantage when we just rely on the animal's behavior. So by using a different animal model, such as insects, we can really record from those brain signals and use those break signals as a template that will allow us to classify an unknown order that can be associated with cancer or other diseases and a healthy model.
That sounds like a really cool approach to detecting cancer.
Mhmm.
Are there specific types of cancer that you're looking at?
Yes. So we have a oral cancer paper that has been published. We also work with lung cancer currently, and we also work with breast cancer. So there's various types of cancers that we can work with in detecting using this type
of platform. Before we go any further, I I just like to know a little bit more about you and your training. Which department are you within? How long have you been studying this work for?
Yes. I started in fall of 2020. I've been here for 4 years. I am currently just graduated in 2025. And I really started, you know, I'm in the biomedical engineering program, specifically with a neural engineering focus. And so we really use that combination of neuroscience and engineering for this type of research.
Cool. So so that that gives me a little bit of a better understanding of how you do your work. From what you just said, you're engineering these insects to specifically, you're engineering their neurocircuitry to reveal to you whether they're detecting cancer or not?
So we don't exactly need to engineer the sensor. The sensor is the insect. The innate innate affection abilities, the sensors already made for us. The sensors, insects, kind of like how the sensor is a dog. Yeah, we're just taking advantage of recording from the brain signals.
So we can record from the brain as they get exposed to volatiles that are being emitted from these cancer or healthy models. And we can send those volatiles to the insect antenna, which is analogous to our nose and then record from the brain and just take the neuroactivity and and do some computational techniques to really decipher what that neuroactivity is telling them.
Just for a bit of clarification, are you training the insects to recognize this volatile cancer molecules? Or is it that you're learning what the insect reads and reading that neural program and or pattern to then associate with that with cancer detection?
Yeah. So we don't need to train the insect at all. The insects, like all animals, have a really strong powerful sense of smell. They can smell really low concentrations of volatiles, and they can smell it over a range of environmental conditions. So it doesn't really matter what the environment is, you know, dogs can go and smell in any type of environment.
We just need to harness that brain signals. We just need to understand what those brain signals are telling us and what the patterns is when they're smelling a cancer cell versus telling, smelling a non cancer cell.
That brings the next question. What is the molecule that you're using to represent as cancer?
It's a variety of what we call volatile organic compounds, VOCs for short. So these VOCs are emitted from cancer cells, or they can be found in our human breath. They can be found in urine, sweat, other biological fluids. And studies have shown that these volatiles exist at different concentrations for cancer populations versus a healthy population. So it gives lead way to, like, a non invasive diagnostic tool.
The issue is that with engineered sensors, with sensors that are like breathalyzer, they can't really detect low concentrations or concentrations in a different environments. You know, it can work in a lab setting, maybe not in a clinical setting. But with animals, since they have that powerful sense of smell, they can really smell those all below volatiles
and those those different concentrations
in different environments. You know, they are called voluntary compounds, and there's a variety of them. And we can just take advantage of that variety of complex mixtures.
My question is, is there a specific insect that you're looking at? And how did you figure out that this insect responds to cancer cells?
In terms of olfaction research, just understanding how we smell, locusts have been used for a couple of decades now, and just understanding of how animals smell. Locusts is analogous to a grasshopper. They're the same species, but a grasshopper is solitary and locusts exist in a social colony. That's why you hear about the swarm of locusts destroying the crops. So they're they're the same species.
They just exist in different social states. We can think of the locusts as just grasshoppers, and that's what we use in our research. We also use honeybees in our research. So honeybees also have a great sense of smell. They're not as widely established as a model in olfaction research, but we've shown that they can also be used for cancer detection.
Are there any other projects that you do that you found during your 5 years in BME?
I also do other extracurricular activities such as participate in a nonprofit organisation called nucleate. Michigan is student run by students at MSU and University of Michigan, where we really try to help students turn that academic bench related research into some type of venture that can be biotechnology or life science focused to hopefully get that research from the bench side to more of the clinic. So that's also what I work on.
Cool. That that sounds like a great way to translate, yeah, like you said, research into a real world application.
I think it's cool that both
in your research and your other extracurriculars and activities that this is something that you're clearly passionate about is making that translation between lab science and real applicable science. So thank you for your time. It was really interesting.
Thank you for having me.