For him, the results prove something he was unsure of at the start. "We're seeing that undergraduate students can go from a jungle trail to complete chemical characterization of a natural product in less than four months," he says. "That's astounding." But much more important to him is the hope that the course has "inspired the scientific imagination" of his students, giving them a "feeling of empowerment to control the direction of an inquiry."

With the HHMI grant, Strobel will repeat the Yale course three times, taking his classes to new locations in search of endophytes. The final outcome of Strobel's experiment in science education may not be known for years to come. For Vekhter, who plans to study his iboga endophyte extracts through his senior year at Yale and intends to "stay in science," the results are already clear. As an undergraduate, he says, "Usually you get plugged in" on a professor's research project, "but here we get to do our own thing."

		Kaury Eisenman focused her hunt on carnivorous plants. She hypothesized they would be inhabited by more endophytes than other plants because they eat insects that have traveled from plant to plant. The only carnivorous plant the graduate teaching assistant could find during the Amazon expedition, however, was the tiny Drosera montana. Although the mature plant could fit on the face of a quarter, each leaf the size of a pencil tip, Eisenman's discovery is providing five students in the class a veritable fungal treasure chest to explore. Her hypothesis seems to have been borne out as she isolated three fungi that killed every test organism she exposed to them. She found the colored compounds the fungi produced in culture media "striking and awe-inspiring." Two of the fungi release a dark red substance while a third fungus produces a very bright yellow compound, or mix of compounds. Undergraduate students have now taken over her potent fungi. They developed two bioassays in which extracts from both red fungi continue to prove highly active. A student noticed that the nearly invisible tips of the Drosera montana's insect-catching appendages are red, possibly due to the presence of the red-producing fungi. While Eisenman is returning to her graduate studies, she says, "I count myself very fortunate to have been a part of what has turned out to be a grand adventure start-to-finish." —M.W.

	PAGE 1 2 3 4 5 6	Go Back