Since MARC seniors will not be able to be at school to conduct our previously planned senior projects, we are now shifting the outcomes of our projects to something that we can accomplish at home.

Before Spring Break, my mentor, Dr. Martin, was very helpful and flexible when it came to helping me with my project. I am so grateful that I can shift my project with so many amazing people supporting me.

My current plans are to write-up my results of the Ames Tests in a scientific paper format.

Today, I met with Dr. Joe Martin to discuss my research. He will be helping me as I begin to transition my project from bacterial based Ames Tests into mammalian cell culture. I am so excited to be collaborating with him and to learn from his knowledge of cell culturing and biology.

Now, I will be researching different cell lines, assays, and media that will be compatible with each other but also that will give me relevant and interesting results for my project.

I am excited about where my project will lead in the next couple of months!

For this experiment I changed several elements of my experimental design to get better and more accurate results:

• filter sterilization of chemicals (which took quite a while because some of my chemicals are very viscous!)
• chemicals are more diluted with water than previously (due to all wells showing mutation for all dilutions and the difficulties in pipetting the very viscous solution)

This morning, I made sure that everything was ready to conduct the experiment this afternoon.

This afternoon, Dr. Donlan came to assist me in conducting my experiment. I am so glad that she came and offered me her professional advice and expertise. Since the bacteria strain in the last experiment had died, this was my first "actual" experiment. MARC coordinator, Stori Oates, also helped with the experiment so that we could be as efficient as possible.

We noticed that since the chemicals were quite viscous, it was hard to get them into a consistency that was easy to pipette. We used the water bath, but unfortunately, the Petrolatum was too viscous and sticky to pipette, so we decided to exclude this chemical from this trial.

I am excited to get back to work on my research this year. These past few weeks, I have been working with my mentor and teachers to create a plan for my research this year. I have decided to continue exploring the theme of carcinogens in daily life. I believe that this is a very compelling issue because people often trust the products they buy, but often consumers know very little about the ingredients of their products. I hope to learn more not just about the carcinogenicity of these products, but also about the impact of research and regulation related to product safety.

This week I met with Stori and Shawn about my supplies and it looks like we will not have lung epithelial cells in time for me to conduct my experiment so we brainstormed a slight shift for my project.

I had spoken earlier this year with Cate S. '19 about her project, using the Ames test to test the mutagenicity of various cosmetics. After speaking with Stori and Shawn, we decided that conducting an Ames test would be an interesting research exploration for Science Symposium. I spoke to Liz Gottlieb (Adv. Biology teacher) and there are reagents for me to work with over the next week.

I am currently researching, Ames test and Juul fluid to combine my previous Science Symposium topic with the new methodology due to the minor set-back.

I am surprised by how few research studies exist (even on science research databases) about the mutagenicity of e-cigarettes. The only research I could find was a 2016 study conducted by the British American Tobacco company R&D (which sounds like a potential conflict of interest to me). Their findings suggest that the e-cigarettes (brand not specified) they tested were non-mutagenic when tested with TA-98 and TA-100 Salmonella typhimurium strains.

This semester I will mainly be conducting my Science Symposium research. Science Symposium is an opportunity for us as students to conduct our own research and design our experimental plans. The end-goal is to present our research findings to the MA and broader scientific community.

I will be conducting two experiments this year, one for Advanced Studies in Inorganic Chemistry and one for the MARC program. My MARC project will be more in-depth because I have longer to build my experimental design and research. I will be using the skills I have learned from this project to apply to my overall research in the MARC program.

About 600,000 people die of cancer every year. This disease touches the lives of many around the world and causes suffering and death to thousands. This disease is so prominent for many, yet curing it remains a mystery to many medical professionals and researchers. Cells are considered cancerous when they rapidly and uncontrollably divide, a process which is known as proliferation. Although a cure for cancer is yet to be found researchers have been finding promising treatments based on the intensity of the cancer and the type of cancer. Chemotherapy has been a more mainstream treatment for many forms of cancer due to its aggressive nature in killing cancerous cells.

A promising new treatment is artemisinin and its derivatives which have been shown to inhibit tumor growth in vivo and in vitro. Artemisinin is a natural compound and a derivative of wormwood; it is the active ingredient in the Artemisia annua plant. In traditional Chinese medicine, the compound is known as “qinghao” and was believed to treat bodily sources of heat or inflammation such as fevers. In the 1970s the Chinese government invested a lot into scientific research about the antimalarial properties of artemisinin and their studies brought forth new drugs that are used to fight malaria. Artemisinin has been shown to have anti-cancer and anti-malaria properties in addition to anti-angiogenic, anti-inflammatory, anti-metastasis, and growth inhibition.

In both in vitro and in vivo studies, research has shown that artemisinin can induce ferroptosis in tumor cells. Ferroptosis is a form of cell death that is determinate on intracellular iron. In order to proliferate quickly, cancer cells contain a greater concentration of intracellular iron than normal cells and tissues. Artemisinin becomes cytotoxic in the presence of ferrous iron. Artemisinin and its derivatives have been shown to inhibit tumor cell growth and induce ferroptosis and apoptosis in various cancers. Artemisinin contains an endoperoxide moiety which can react with iron to form cytotoxic free radicals.

Artemisinin analogs are less effective in cancer treatment than artemisinin dimers, trimers, and hybrid compounds, which also produce significantly fewer side effects than chemotherapeutic agents. Research has also shown that dihydroartemisinin treatments have been more effective after cell incubation with holotransferrin, a compound that augments the ferrous iron concentration in the cancer cells.