Jo Becuti-Ortiz, a junior majoring in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering working as the undergraduate lab manager in the Betenbaugh Lab, headed by Michael Betenbaugh, described his undergraduate research journey in an interview with The News-Letter.
The Betenbaugh Lab’s main research involves using either microbes or mammalian cell lines to synthesize biologics, which are drugs or vaccines that are derived from biological sources. Becuti-Ortiz is working on the Living Wall project which uses Bacillus cellulus, a sturdy bacterial strain with the potential to help combat secondary infections at hospitals.
This research is crucial towards developing drugs for antibiotic-resistant pathogens like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. In his research, Becuti-Ortiz had the opportunity to work with various techniques, which involve high-performance liquid chromatography for characterising substances and prepping samples for gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.
Becuti-Ortiz described the broader implications of his research in terms of fighting antibiotic resistance occurring through improper antibiotic use — many people, for example, take their antibiotics for fewer days than the prescribed time of use, which is often ineffective.
“At some point, antibiotics will become not as useful or effective as before, because most of the time we see a common trend of people misusing antibiotics,” he said. “If you use them for [shorter than the prescribed time], there’s a chance that there are still some pathogens that are in you, that are still alive, that now are becoming adaptive to the antibiotic.”
Because of that, it is important to engineer new antibiotics. One approach that the Betenbaugh Lab focuses on is using the metabolites secreted from other bacteria as potential sources of antibiotics.
“So as long as you're able to engineer a plasmid... to create this metabolite that you know is very effective against this certain bacteria strain or this certain virus or this certain pathogen, you'll be able to effectively use it against this new pathogen,” Becuti-Ortiz said.
He then described his role in the Betenbaugh Lab. As undergraduate lab manager, Becuti-Ortiz talks to the Principal Investigator, helps him coordinate undergraduate lab meetings and assists with the hiring of new undergraduates by matching people based on their interests to graduate students in the lab.
When approaching challenges in research, Becuti-Ortiz emphasized the need to continue to ask questions and be open to learning.
“It’s just better to understand that you can learn from your mistakes and just ask questions — mistakes are perfectly okay.”
He also talked about his experience with research in the summer when approaching a new project.
“I was scared because I didn't have much experience, and I stopped asking questions... but then I was like, this is not satisfying my drive to learn as much as I can. It was time for me to actually pursue what I want, and that's what I did, and that's how I overcame that challenge,” he said.
Some advice Becuti-Ortiz gave to other Hopkins students is to be persistent in looking for research, emphasizing the ease of access to research here at Hopkins. He shared a rough collection of first steps such as creating a collection of possible labs to work in and cold-emailing professors.
“We have four short and, at the same time, long years at Hopkins. Enjoy your time at Hopkins. Enjoy your first year,” he said. “There will always be research here, so there’s no race to it.”
