{"id":12768,"date":"2019-09-09T10:02:43","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T14:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biology.mit.edu\/?p=12768"},"modified":"2020-10-28T22:52:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T02:52:12","slug":"the-chemist-and-the-poet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biology.mit.edu\/the-chemist-and-the-poet\/","title":{"rendered":"The chemist and the poet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeandele Elliot was raised on poetry. Like the Nobel Prize winning writer Derek Walcott, she grew up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia where the locals celebrate the epic, multi-volume poems that won Walcott the 1992 prize for literature. Elliot grew up with the adults around her extolling Walcott\u2019s brilliance, but it wasn\u2019t until she left St. Lucia that she understood why this island was so inspirational to Walcott. Young Walcott left St. Lucia to pursue a life as a writer decades before Elliot was born; similarly, Elliot left to study chemical engineering at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Although their vocations differ, Walcott infused his work with the qualities of his home country before his death in 2017, just as Elliot does today. While Walcott\u2019s poetry returns again and again to his love for the island\u2019s people and natural landscape, Elliot applies St. Lucia\u2019s culture of hard work and resilience to her science.<\/p>\n

These traits have served Elliot well at Howard University, where she\u2019s currently entering her junior year. It also earned her a spot in\u00a0MIT\u2019s Summer Research Program in Biology<\/a>\u00a0(MSRP-Bio), for which she received a scholarship from the\u00a0Gould Fund<\/a>. During this 10-week internship, Elliot worked in biology professor\u00a0Jing-Ke Weng\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0lab, studying the biochemical pathway that\u00a0produces sporopollenin<\/a>, an exceptionally strong substance that coats and protects pollen grains.<\/p>\n

Elliot has loved science since she was in high school, and her ambition to be an impactful researcher was initially inspired by the value St. Lucians place on academic success. Walcott is one of two Nobel Laureates who grew up on St. Lucia \u2014 the second being Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the 1979 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences \u2014 and every year the locals celebrate these two citizens during Nobel Laureate Week. The celebrations inspired Elliot to aim high when it came to her own career. \u201cThese people are from the same culture as I am, and they got so far. So I can definitely do the same thing; there\u2019s nothing holding me back,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Elliot\u2019s mother, a middle school principal, shared this sentiment, and she made it clear that she expected all of her children to pursue higher education. In preparation, she encouraged Elliot and her three siblings to focus on science starting in grade nine, when the St. Lucian school system requires students to begin specializing in either science, business, or arts. Scientific careers require many years of education, so she thought it would be best for her children to start learning this discipline early, even if they decided to switch to other careers later down the line.<\/p>\n

\u201cI studied science in high school knowing that I had to, but I also really enjoyed it,\u201d Elliot says. She especially loved drawing chemical structures, then picturing these same structures as components of the reactions that changed colors and emitted interesting smells when the class performed experiments.<\/p>\n

Sometimes practical considerations interfere with passions, however, and there was one hurdle Elliot had to overcome before she could attend college: money. Educating her three older siblings had exhausted her family\u2019s finances, so Elliot was on her own when it came to figuring out how to pay for school. After finishing a two-year course of study in sciences called \u201cA-levels\u201d that St. Lucians pursue after high school, Elliot spent an additional two years working in a high school science lab while she looked for scholarships.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was one of the hardest times in my life because I wasn\u2019t guaranteed to go to university,\u201d she says. But, inspired by the Caribbean spirit of resilience, she resolved to find a way. In the end, Howard University offered her a full scholarship, which she happily accepted.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore I went to college, I had this infatuation with doing research,\u201d Elliot says. \u201cWhen I went to Howard, I was able to join a lab, and then I fully realized my passion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elliot became captivated by the millimeter-long nematode\u00a0Caenorhabditis elegans<\/em>, and she discovered that a group of enzymes known for their role in protein degradation have a second function that affects the worm\u2019s fertility. Not everyone would have enjoyed the hours that Elliot spent propagating tiny worms by moving them from one agar-filled petri dish to another, but she loved the moments of discovery that followed her hard work. That was when she knew she wanted to pursue a research career.<\/p>\n

Elliot sought advice on her college applications from fellow Caribbean and MIT electrical engineering professor\u00a0Cardinal Warde<\/a>, who\u00a0coordinates a program<\/a>\u00a0that introduces Carribean high school students to STEM careers. In addition to helping with her college applications, Warde told her about MSRP-Bio. This rigorous dive into research sounded like great preparation for graduate school, so the conversation stuck with Elliot, and several years later she applied, got in, and joined the Weng lab, studying sporopollenin.<\/p>\n

Elliot spent the summer engineering bacteria to produce a protein called LAP3 that plants use to make sporopollenin, trying to isolate LAP3 so she could figure out where it falls in the chain of events that leads to sporopollenin production. She and her colleagues in the Weng lab want to understand the mechanism underlying this process because it may give engineers ideas for making strong, flexible, synthetic materials like wearable electronics. Sporopollenin degrades slowly after ingestion, so researchers have also suggested coating drugs with this substance so that they\u2019ll be released gradually once inside the human body.<\/p>\n

Elliot is fascinated by this intersection of technology and chemistry, and thinks she might like to center her PhD thesis on a similar topic. In particular, nanotechnology that improves cancer drug delivery has captured her imagination, and she may try to pursue such research at the\u00a0Koch Institute at MIT<\/a>\u00a0after she graduates from Howard University.<\/p>\n

Purifying LAP3 was a tricky task, as a portion of the protein that targets it to chloroplasts also made it difficult to separate from the bacteria Elliot was using to produce it. Removing this chloroplast targeting sequence made purifying LAP3 possible, but only in combination with a bacterial protein called a chaperone that is typically responsible for binding other proteins to make sure they maintain functional conformations. Elliot tested the function of LAP3 and the chaperone together, and found that they use a water molecule to break apart another protein in the sporopollenin production pathway. Other Weng lab members will continue to try to isolate LAP3 after Elliot leaves, in order to confirm the activity they observed can truly be attributed to this protein.<\/p>\n

As Elliot solidified her knowledge of biochemistry, she formed lasting relationships with the people in her lab and in her MSRP-Bio cohort. Walcott wrote of feeling \u201cburdened\u201d by his conflicting loves for St. Lucia, where he wanted to live, and for writing, which necessitated leaving. When Elliot first moved to the United States, she truly understood these poems for the first time, as her island\u2019s warm, familiar faces and wave-strewn shores were suddenly replaced with an unfamiliar culture and bitter winters. At MIT, Elliot found a fantastic group of coworkers who embodied the St. Lucian spirit of friendship. \u201cEveryone in my lab treated me like I was one of them,\u201d she says. \u201cThey reached out to me to strike up conversations, tell me funny stories, and just talk to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside of the Weng lab, Elliot\u2019s MSRP-Bio cohort also provided a wealth of friendship. For the first time, she found peers who truly shared her passion for research. The students all lived in an MIT dorm, where their conversations went on long into the night. \u201cWe\u2019d go on and on about our experiments,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was like a vortex of science.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Walcott and Lewis motivated Elliot to aim high, her time at MIT gave her the technical skills to handle whatever challenges science throws at her. \u201cThe MSRP program has made me quite savvy about the way research works,\u201d she says. Combined with the St. Lucian spirit of working hard and always striving for success, Elliot is returning to Howard with the full array of qualities that will help her become the \u201chard working, efficient, and impactful researcher\u201d that she wants to be.<\/p>\n

Photo credit: Saima Sidik<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeandele Elliot was raised on poetry. Like the Nobel Prize winning writer Derek Walcott, she grew up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia where the locals celebrate the epic, multi-volume poems that won Walcott the 1992 prize for literature. 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