MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2

  1. Last July a seven-year old boy was admitted to Boston's Children Hospital emergency room with a high fever and a severely infected leg. The symptoms worsened over the next 48 hours and the infection did not respond to any combinations of known antibiotics. The lab was able to isolate and culture the bacteria from the wound and determined that it was a highly virulent multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacterium.
  2. The boy was in critical condition and doctors had to act fast. The only effective but radical treatment to insure survival was to amputate the boy's leg.   However, before using this drastic method, the doctors contacted scientists at MIT who specialized in microbiology and charged them with the urgent mission of finding, isolating and characterizing a novel bacteriophage that could infect and kill the multi-drug resistant pathogenic bacteria. 
  3. In order to accomplish this mission and save the boy's leg the MIT team tried to isolate phages from the environment where the boy had been exposed (Willow pond in the Mt Auburn cemetery).  Unfortunately the team of MIT scientists was unable to find a bacteriophage strain that could specifically kill the virulent bacteria and also be safe for the boy.  The boy's leg had therefore to be amputated.  Since then the boy has fully recovered but he is one leg short.
  4. While another department at MIT has been building a state of the art robot leg for the boy, our team has been charged with the amazing task of attempting to grow back this boy's leg.  This has never been done before but we believe that we may be able to at least make some concrete progress in that direction.  Our team of scientists has decided to study regeneration in the common flatworm planarian.  Planarians are known to regenerate fully from a piece as small as 1/270 of the their body size.  The amazing regenerating ability of planarian may very well hold the key to organ and tissue regeneration in humans.
 
  1. Your Mission
  • Collect planaria from the environment
  • Establish planarian colonies in the lab
  • Observe planarian's anatomy using dissecting and compound light microscopy
  • Observe planarian's homing behavior and locomotion
  • Cut planarian to study regeneration
    • Determine timeline required for full regeneration
    • Determine effect of salt and other chemicals on regeneration
  • Stain planarians using various vital stains or dyes.          
  • Determine genetic variability among the various planarians by performing genomic DNA RFLPs
  • Conduct phylogenetic studies
  • Design a simple test to determine if Planarians have any ability to learn and remember.
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