SCIENCE
October 23, 2014
argosy@mta.ca
Wild Toads Lab takes on drug-resistant TB Chem lab experimenting with Isoniazid Clay Steell
Science Reporter The Wild Toads Lab is a research group on campus probably known best for wall paintings and clothes themed after The Simpsons. Headed by the chemistry department’s Steve Westcott, the lab researches anticancer treatments and ways of improving tuberculosis medicine, along with other medical topics. The Argosy visited the lab to talk to three of the four honours students working there this year about their research. Hannah Caron, Morgan Morrisey, and Tom Kostelnick are doing three separate honours projects on the antiTuberculosis compound Isoniazid. “Isoniazid is one of the drugs that’s used to treat Tuberculosis, but there’s a lot of multi-drug resistant strains of [Tuberculosis], so we want to modify its structure so that the drug won’t be resistant to it anymore,” said Caron. Tuberculosis, or TB, is an airborne bacteria that infects about one third of the world’s population. A majority of cases occur in developing countries or regions with poor health care. About 1,600 TB cases occur in Canada every year. “I thought it was an issue in developing countries and wasn’t here,” said Morrisey, “but then in June 2014 there was a confirmed case of Tuberculosis at the Université de Moncton, and that was the second
Hannah Caron (right), Morgan Morrissey (left) both doing their honours in the Wild Toad Lab (Clay Steell/Argosy) case in a year. That’s close to home.” “They’ve had a drug treatement [for TB] for years, but a lot of multidrug resistant strains are occurring because people aren’t taking the full treatement,” said Caron. Isoniazid needs to be taken regularly over a six-month period for treatment to be effective. Caron and Morrisey said that drug-resistant strains of TB can arise when people stop taking Isoniazid, usually because they can’t afford it or their symptoms disappear. “[Drug-resistant strains] can be spread to other people because it’s an airborne disease,” said Caron.
She said that resistant strains of TB can readily infect other TB patients already on Isoniazid and are potentially untreatable. “If one of our drugs were tested for anti-TB properties and shows really strong bioactivity, we could help so many people,” said Caron. “We have Isoniazid and we’re adding similar derivatives to it to modify its activity,” said Kostelnick. Caron is chemically binding Isoniazid with maltol, a flavour enhancer commonly used in foods like hot chocolate, and various metals. By doing so she hopes to make Isoniazid
more permeable to the TB bacteria’s cell membrane. Morrisey is binding Isoniazid with furan and thiophene, which are reactive aromatic liquids, and Kostelnick is binding it with a Sulfur-containing derivative and Carbon. The three honours students said they will be synthesizing their experimental compounds over the term, and that next term will be spent experimentally ensuring their purity. When ready, the compounds will be sent to various other universities and institutions to test their bioactivity in living cells.
Their research was funded by individual grants from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The lab has a tradition of popping a bottle of champagne every time it publishes a scientific paper. The paper’s title is then taped onto the bottle and placed on a shelf along with scores of other such bottles. “A lot of [Dr. Westcott’s] students graduate Mt. A with their names on papers,” said Caron. “It’s pretty awesome. Last week we had three bottles of champagne.”
Want to detect cosmic rays? There’s an app for that Smartphone app detects particles from space Clay Steell
Science Reporter Smartphone users can soon help solve a cosmic mystery with a quick download. A developing app called CRAYFIS uses hardware commonly found in smartphones to detect Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs), an anomaly poorly understood by modern physics. If successful, this network of smartphone detectors would technically become the largest telescope in the world. At every moment, the Earth is inundated in a stream of highenergy particles from space known as cosmic rays. Our atmosphere blocks most of the energy of these particles, causing them to decay into a shower of smaller particles known as muons. These muon showers are detectable only on the ground directly below them, making their research relatively difficult. Muons interact weakly with matter; one passes harmlessly through your head about every second. Most cosmic rays are low energy,
but some, like the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays, have about the same energy as a baseball thrown at 90 km/h. However, they’re so rare that much remains unknown about their origins. The largest cosmic ray detector in the world, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, is 3,000 square kilometres (about half the size of the Greater Toronto Area), and only detects one UHECR every four weeks on average. The CRAYFIS app, short for Cosmic Ray Finder in Smartphones, hopes to dramatically expand scientists’ ability to detect these high-energy cosmic rays. Physicists and astronomers at the University of California discovered that smartphone cameras can detect the muon showers created by cosmic rays. In an open-access paper published online last week, they said that 825,000 smartphones could reach the same detecting power as the entire Pierre Auger Observatory. The paper’s authors said that a smartphone array is an ideal candidate for cosmic ray detection. About 1.5 billion people on Earth use smartphones, creating an enormous potential sampling size. Most smartphones are equipped with GPS to say where a muon shower is occurring, as well as Wi-Fi to upload detection data. The app would activate muon
detection only after a smartphone is connected to a power source and the screen is asleep, so as not to use battery or processing power when the phone is in use. The smartphone cameras can detect muons when charging indoors, as the particles pass through walls. High-energy cosmic rays originate from outside our solar system, but from where is unknown. Astronomers hypothesize that they may come from matter ejected by supermassive black holes at the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies, or possibly even from the poorly understood dark matter that inundates the observable universe. The creators of CRAYFIS say that increasing our ability to detect cosmic rays could help solve where they come from. Understanding the nature of cosmic rays could lead to dramatic insights in physics and astronomy. Due to their energy, cosmic rays remain unaltered as they travel across time and space, and give an observable window into the universe’s birth and ancient past. The muon shower data can be uploaded either anonymously or publicly. Data uploaded publicly guarantees its discoverer coauthorship of any published findings. CRAYFIS will be available to download on iOS 7 and Android 2.3.3. Its publication date is unannounced, but the app has begun limited beta testing.
CRAYFIS, an app that detects cosmic rays, will soon be available for Android and iPhone users. . (Chris Donovan/Argosy)