The University of Chicago is home to hundreds of the world’s most advanced laboratories and research facilities. The Inside the Lab series gives audiences a first-hand look at the University’s research laboratories and the scholars who are tackling some of the world’s most complex problems.
This includes the Light Lab, gut microbiome research led by Prof. Sam Light—which studies the network of billions of bacteria, fungi and microbes that live within our guts. Light and his team’s work has implications not only in understanding biology but in treating disease and enhancing health.
Michael Nelson, a third-year in the College double majoring in molecular engineering and chemistry works in the lab, shares more about his experience. Learn more about the work being done in the lab here.
What do your duties in the Light Lab entail?
The short and dirty I give as an explanation sometimes is that I take bacteria and see what they poop out.
More specifically, I’m working on a project called Molecular Squirreling Away, or MSA. Guts are a pretty resource-competitive environment. Basically, some bacteria will take long chains of sugars, and instead of trying to process the sugars faster than their competitors, they take it, cut it and make a ring out of it, so that it's sequestered—nobody else can use it.
My job was to look at other bacteria and do screens to see if more of them would do that. I really got into it this past summer, where I was working full time with the lab. It’s been a mix of helping my grad student with what she's been doing, and doing my own screens as well. We’re growing different bacteria and then running tests under different conditions to see the results. By analyzing genomes and different genes, we’re hoping to predict how the bacteria will behave.
What excites you about this work?
I think it's really cool that the work directly pertains to our health. The more research that comes out, the more we realize that the gut microbiome is very tightly intertwined with our health. It feels directly relevant to medicine.
How does contributing in the lab help prepare you for your life beyond UChicago?
While I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do after college, being exposed to the research environment as a complement to what I'm learning in class has been an invaluable experience.
In class, we’re handed a procedure and the instructions outline: “do this and this and this, and this is what you're expecting to see.”
Here, I get to actually do work in the wet lab, grow bacteria, conduct tests and practice my technical skills by doing some computer analysis of data. We don't know exactly what we're going to see, and have to design our experiments without knowing the result.
The process of experiencing how research is conducted and that open endedness, I think, is very applicable to what I'm hoping to do in the future in the field of science.