Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory
Bacteriology Department April 2019 — January 2021
Student Research Technician
Keywords: research technician, Bruker MALDI TOF, BSL-2, No-ID project
The Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL) handles and tests a variety of specimens from wildlife, companion, performance, and production food animals. My position in the Bacteriology department as a student technician for one year and ten months gave me pivotal and professional experiences with industry biotechnologies. The testing procedures performed on a weekly basis include antibiotic sensitivity panels, bacterial identification, Salmonella monitoring, and eventually protein extraction and sequencing.
A majority of the samples consisted of organs and tissues from postmortem large-mammals. As a high-throughput BSL-2 lab, I would aseptically prepare an array of diagnostic tests on specialized media in a biosafety cabinet for upwards of 80 cases per day. In the following 24 and 48 hours, each of the hundreds of samples were examined and subcultured for suspected disease causing agents. To confirm isolation diagnoses, questionable isolates were run on Bruker matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry (MS) for protein characterization. When it came to unidentified (No-ID project) samples— isolates of low confidence in Bruker MALDI-TOF results— I was tasked with a project to perform DNA and protein extraction in preparation for genetic sequencing.
To achieve this, I structured a method of collecting samples from the Diagnostic Associates with a colleague and proceeded to execute dozens of extractions per month. Upon receiving genetic sequencing data back, I would manually input the segments of interest into the Bruker reference database for future isolates to be more rapidly and confidently identified. These actions ultimately increased the diagnostic power and accuracy of our lab to a sub-species level, providing farmers and external investigators with more precise diagnoses.
Additional duties included transferring isolated colonies to brain heart infusion (BHI) glycerine broth fr archives, and tracking all sample movements through the Laboritory Information Management System (LIMS) software to ensure organization. I was fortunate to be exposed to such a hands on undergraduate laboratory position and left VDL with a newfound confidence in communicating with industrial and biotechnilogical representatives, handling infectious disease samples, and contributing to the growing public reference database for proteomics.
