Tour of the Project Violet Lab
I had always thought that those lab doors hiding its pure white set—almost holy and untouchable because I had never been in one, only a bystander looking through the windows—would not open to me until I graduated college or had that expertise. I had a vague understanding of what was actually there through textbooks and Google Images. What machines were in there? Probably a freezer and some gels… Anything else? I don’t know. I was fortunate enough to be able to tour a lab with Dr. Shanon Turnbough and get a glimpse of the machines in there. There was so much in the lab. Every inch of space was occupied. Six freezers which can chill down -80 C in one corner. An entire bench dedicated to gels and mass spectrometry instruments. Computers and wires swarming over microscopes and FPLCs. Serious stuff was going on.
This was the Olson Lab, which in the general scope was focused on finding treatments for rare, incurable diseases. In Dr. Shanon Turnbough’s presentation, the team had been focusing on Project Violet, named after a cancer patient who died of brainstem glioma. Project Violet had set out to find tumor paint based on scorpion venom.
Scorpion venom has proteins which are cysteine-rich. These proteins are also known as knottins and are very stable because of the disulfide bonds which form between cysteines. The chain of the amino acids, also known as a peptide, can be fashioned into an optide (optimized peptide) by altering the amino acids. The optides are small—about 40 amino acids long. The team uses a computer modeling system to find the best optide which can bind to tumors. Once the general sequence is known, they execute this in the lab. The team orders thousands of DNA sequences of variable optides and grows them in human embryonic kidney cells. These cells will express the genes given to them and the protein will exist in a solution.
As Dr. Shanon Turnbough led us to the lab, I made a couple of similarities between the Olson lab and my own Biotech classroom. They had the gels with gel boxes, gallons of TAE snuggled along a wall, cords hanging loosely off the edge. However, aside from the small and basic, there were the large and complicated. Dr. Shanon Turnbough brought us in front of a Fast Protein Liquid Chromatography Machine (FPLC: Top picture) which diminished my classroom’s column chromatography lab using tiny spin columns. FPLC works by using high pressure to force the sample through Nickel-based columns and extract the wanted product out of a mixture. This machine was used to extract the optide from the rest of the mixture containing cell parts. With the optide now obtained, the team used a machine known as the lyophilizer (Bottom) which removes water from the substance thus creating a powder. The optide is now prepared and ready for use.
As I was leaving the lab, I saw SAM, a robot capable of making cell cultures and completing other tasks a hundred times faster than a human and which was named after another cancer patient. A million dollars was invested in this machine giving the team an edge to find therapeutics for incurable diseases. It’s still not enough but it’s definitely a start.
In her presentation, Dr. Turnbough said that ideally a therapeutic would attach to the optide and find the tumor. I later learned that these optides could be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases by allowing misfolded proteins to be seen by cell machinery and broken down. So many options with this one substance derived from venom. All done in this lab nestled in the corner of a bland brick building.
