By Stacia M. Rink
Assistant Professor

The research laboratories at PLU have been very active this summer! Several professors have been working with students and visiting faculty on biochemical, organic, and physical chemistry related projects. Not only were students hard at work at the bench, but they also worked on communicating their findings to various audiences. Researchers who were funded by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust gave oral research presentations for the weekly Natural Sciences research meetings, held in Rieke Science Center, at PLU. Participants in the Partners in Science Program (PIS) gave both oral and poster presentations or their research at a meeting in Vancouver, WA during the first week of August. Most summer researchers will also be presenting their findings at the Murdock Undergraduate Research Symposium on November 3 and 4, 2000.

The following is a summary of the research performed during Summer 2000.

Assistant Professor Jeff Schultz has been working on a variety of experiments with four researchers from western Washington and Oregon. Three projects focus on understanding how mitochondrial mutations affect the cellular antioxidant response using yeast as a model system, and one project involves extracting DNA as a determinant for soil system health. Linda Hill, a high school chemistry teacher at Bothell High School (WA) joined the lab for her second summer as a Partners in Science fellow. Her project involves understanding the antioxidant response of respiratory-deficient yeast mutants to oxidative stress. Omar Stubblefield is also a PIS fellow and a high school biology and chemistry teacher at Powder Valley High School in North Powder (OR). Omar is exploring the yeast response to nitrogen free radicals. Jacquelyn Kimball (‘03, Gig Harbor, WA) is helping to bridge Linda and Omar’s projects by examining how yeast respiratory-deficient mutants respond to stress induced via paraquat (an herbicide) and nitric oxide exposure using viability and spectrophotometric assays. Jacquelyn is being supported through the Division of Natural Sciences summer research program. Results from these three projects should contribute to a better understanding of the many diseases and pathologies associated with free radicals and mitochondrial defects including neurological disorders and the aging process. James Deville, a senior at Bothell High School, also joins the lab through the Partners in Science Program and a Regency Advancement Award. Jimmy is helping expand on a soil DNA extraction project that was initiated by Katherine Maloney (’00) and Sasha Stensen (’00) as a independent project in Biochemistry 405 this past spring. This project aims to help correlate soil health with water quality in local watersheds.

Associate Professor Dean Waldow worked with four researchers during summer 2000: Jason Higbee (03, Tacoma, WA), Scott Stewart ('01, Tacoma, WA), Brita Willis, ('01, Wenatchee, WA) and Daryl Matthews (chemistry teacher from Rogers High School ,WA). Scott and Brita's summer stipends were funded by Dean's NSF grant, as well as part of Jason Higbee's stipend. Jason also received funding from the Division of Natural Sciences Murdock grant. Daryl joined the lab for the second summer as a Partners in Science fellow (supported by Research Corporation and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust). Brita and Scott were both researching various aspects of phase separation behavior in polymer blends. Phase behavior in polymer blends were studied using temperature jump wide angle light scattering for a three component blend consisting of polybutadiene, polystyrene, and a copolymer of these two homopolymers. Brita focused on the concentration dependence of the copolymer while Scott worked on a higher molecular weight polymer blend. The process of unmixing is very important in many industrial processes. Jason's project involved building a Beowulf Linux Cluster and using this computational cluster to conduct Monte Carlo Simulations of three-component polymer blends. The computational cluster consists of 10 nodes connected via a fast ethernet network. The inital blend work focused on different copolymer structures at different concentrations. Lastly, Daryl implemented techniques for anionic copolymer synthesis. She prepared homopolymer and copolymers with narrow molecular weight distributions. The syntheses were conducted under an ultra-pure Argon atmosphere using alkyl-lithium initiators and characterized with NMR, GPC, and DSC. These synthetic techiques are important for synthesizing special copolymers for the blend work and deuterated polymers/ copolymers for neutron scattering. Funding for this work comes from NSF (Brita, Scott), Chemistry's Summer Research Fund and Murdock Charatible trust (Jason), and Research Corporation (Daryl).

Professor and Department Chair Craig Fryhle worked with senior chemistry major Peter Anderson ('01, Bothell, WA) . Peter used molecular modeling techniques and NMR to continue work studying the conformational properties of natural and fluorinated shikimic acid pathway metabolites. He generated conformer ensembles of shikimic acid, (6R)-6-fluoroshikimic acid, 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate (EPSP), and (6R)-6-fluoro-EPSP. Boltzmann-averaged proton NMR coupling constants predicted by modeling were compared with experimental NMR data to study how fluorine substitution effects the conformational properties of these molecules, which in turn may influence the biological activity of the fluorinated analogues.