Two ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College scientists have received nearly $373,000 from the National Institutes of Health for first-of-its-kind research into the genetic functioning of bacteria that cause Lyme disease.

The project draws on new capabilities in high-resolution microscopy that make it possible to observe spatial arrangements of RNA in Borrelia burgdorferi, one of four Borrelia species that cause Lyme disease. This study of variations in RNA location and shape could eventually suggest new medical responses to Lyme, which strikes up to 300,000 people in the U.S. annually.

Receiving the $372,639 grant for the two-year project are physicist Travis Gould, an expert in the field of fluorescence nanoscopy, and biochemist Paula Schlax, who researches gene expression in spiral-shaped bacteria, also known as spirochetes, such as Lyme bacteria.

Biochemist Paula Schlax and physicist Travis Gould pose with Gould’s STED super-resolution microscope in Carnegie Science Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“RNA is an intermediate in the process of cells making proteins,” says Schlax, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. “We’re trying to understand generally how production of proteins gets turned on and off when the bacteria move from ticks to mammals and from mammals back to ticks” — changes in the bacteria’s environment that change the shape and location of RNA.

“We know from other bacteria that RNA’s location inside the cell seems to affect how long that RNA lasts — whether it’s near the edges of the cell, or the ends of the cell, or spread out evenly inside. Our hypothesis is that how fast RNA gets broken down, or doesn’t get broken down, probably helps the cell decide which proteins to make when conditions change, such as when the bacteria moves from the tick to a mammal or vice versa.”

Variations in protein production could cause variations in the bacteria’s disease-causing capability. “The more we understand that process,” Schlax says, “the easier it is to think about new targets for drugs and new therapeutics.”

Until quite recently, the physical limitations of microscope technology curtailed its usefulness in testing such a hypothesis. The bacteria have a characteristic shape, says Gould: very skinny in relation to length. The length is typically around 20 microns, or millionths of a meter, but the bacteria’s internal diameter is vastly smaller, at about 200 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. (A piece of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.)

“That 200 nanometers is, in the best-case scenario, at the limit of a conventional microscope’s resolution,” Gould says. “So a conventional microscope can’t answer these questions about where RNA is within that 200-nanometer cylinder.”

But Gould, an associate professor of physics, is an innovator in imaging technologies that use lasers, fluorescing molecules, and other means to attain much higher resolution. For the NIH-funded research, he has adapted an existing ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ microscope that he built and that uses a process called stimulated emission depletion, or STED, to capture images of the B. burgdorferi RNA.

Going from older microscopy technologies to Gould’s newly updated STED “is like putting on glasses for the first time.”

Specifically, he added another laser to the instrument that expands its imaging capability from two to three dimensions. Going from older technologies to this latest iteration, says Schlax, “is like putting on glasses for the first time.”

Complementary to the STED technology, the researchers and their students will use a technique called fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) that deploys fluorescent probes to specific parts of the “transcripts” that the microbe’s DNA imparts to its RNA.

The research will be the first to identify patterns of transcript localization within B. burgdorferi, and, notably, the first research to use STED microscopy for this sort of localization within any spirochete.

This is significant given the range and impact of diseases caused by such bacteria, including syphilis, yaws, periodontal disease, and leptospirosis, whose effects include kidney failure.

Joining Schlax and Gould in the project are ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students and research associate Anna Bowsher, whose position is funded by the NIH grant. The work entails growing B. burgdorferi microbes in the lab, affixing individual cells to slides, and introducing DNA molecules, complete with fluorescent tags, that are tailored to activate a specific RNA response.

Then the slides will be examined with Gould’s STED microscope, and the results compiled into a spatial-distribution analysis of different types of RNAs. The team hopes that they will have results to report by summer 2020.

The project will involve both thesis students advised by Gould and Schlax and students doing summer research. “These kinds of projects really are great for students to see how science is done,” says Schlax, “and hopefully get their names on some papers and keep them interested in science.”

With the use of fluorescing molecules now standard practice in high-resolution microscopy, STED imaging achieves enhanced resolution through a technique of selectively switching off such molecules. STED is one of a number of so-called super-resolution techniques developed to bypass the diffraction limit, a limit on the resolution of conventional microscopy imposed by the length of light waves.

Gould estimates that all told, there are likely two dozen or so labs equipped with commercially available STED microscopes, and another handful that use custom-built instruments like his.

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ has announced four faculty promotions, including tenure awards, effective Aug. 1 for the 2019–20 academic year.

Travis Gould, physics, and Michael Rocque, sociology, were promoted from assistant to associate professor and were granted tenure. Krista Aronson, psychology, was promoted from associate to full professor. Anita Charles, education, was promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer.

The promotions were recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College Board of Trustees.

“Their extraordinary talents are emblematic of the across-the-board excellence of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty.”

“The faculty whose promotions we are celebrating this year, in physics, sociology, education, and psychology, are not only leading scholars, but also, through their teaching, guides who lead our students and our community to engage with important ideas,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“Their extraordinary talents are emblematic of the across-the-board excellence of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty.”

Meet the four newly promoted faculty members, learn their research fields, and discover why they teach.

Associate Professor of Physics Travis Gould

Assistant Professor of Physics Travis Gould (center) works students during his Short Term course “Microcontroller Laboratory” in 2015. (Josh Kuckens/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Appointment year: 2013

Doctoral institution: University of Maine, Orono

Fields of research: Adaptive optics, development and application of fluorescence microscopy techniques, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, fluorescence nanoscopy, image processing, light-sheet microscopy, STED microscopy, super-resolution microscopy

Why I teach: Having been primarily a researcher before coming to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that teaching has been such a rewarding experience. It has also been an opportunity for me to learn — as I’m trying to work concepts out for myself, I’m sharing the thought process with the students, making connections between technologies and the physics behind them. The students and I have been able to go through the process of figuring it out together.

Our students really get into the material and many of them want to apply it in a research setting. It’s been really nice to see that excitement, and to have students come from classes into my lab to do summer research, senior thesis, or independent study.

Associate Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque

Associate Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque is also the faculty liaison to the Bobcat football team. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Appointment year: 2014

Doctoral institution: Northeastern University

Fields of research: Biosocial crime prevention, corrections, criminology theory, desistance from crime, life-course criminology, race and crime, race and school discipline, risk assessment in corrections, survey research

Why I teach: I feel like I am among the luckiest people in the world to be able to call ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College my professional home. It is an institution that truly values educating the whole person and allows us as professors to do that in innovative and creative ways.

As professors, we get to witness and play a small part in the development of young people as they make their way from their teens into adulthood, becoming the people they will be for the rest of their lives. It is an honor to be able to do this for a living.

Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson

Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson reviews picture books during a Short Term course trip to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Appointment year: 2003

Doctoral institution: University of Michigan

Fields of research: Digital humanities, multicultural children’s literature, intercultural competence, racial and ethnic identity development, acculturation, immigration, psychometric assessment

Why I teach: I love my job because I get to engage amazing students in meaningful work designed to affect contemporary social problems — every day.

Whether it’s in the classroom, in the library, at school, or online through the Diverse BookFinder, I love working with ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students to bring theory and research into practice. This is my passion.

Senior Lecturer in Education and Director of Secondary Teacher Education Anita Charles

Senior Lecturer in Education Anita Charles teaches a course on topics in special education in 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Appointment year: 2004

Doctoral institution: University of New Hampshire

Fields of research: Early and adolescent literacy, public education reform, special education, teacher education

Why I teach: I come from a long line of educators — my passion for teaching is literally in my blood! After years of teaching in K–12 venues, I now teach future educators at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ who aim to make the world a better place for all children and youth. I hope to cultivate in my students a love of learning and teaching in relationship with young people in the community and beyond.

I believe that the work I do encourages transformative reflection and engagement, rigorous ideological exploration tied to practical civic action, and a commitment to social justice within educational institutions.

Education is the linchpin of democracy; the courses I teach in literacy, special education, and teacher education aim to disrupt hegemonies and assumptions around systemic power structures and around concepts of ability and possibility. My hope is that students leave my courses with at least as many questions as answers.

Assistant Professor of Physics Travis Gould has been awarded a $473,000 grant to develop a powerful microscope that will allow researchers to examine DNA and various proteins found in cell nuclei.

The grant, from the Maine IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), will allow Gould to build a “super-resolution” nanoscope that will provide dual-color imaging at nanometer resolution.

This nanoscope will allow Gould, his colleagues, and students to better study and understand how genes are regulated through the organization of chromatin, the material of which chromosomes are made.

Assistant Professor of Physics Travis Gould (center) works with Armando Morales Urrutia ’16 (left) of Fraijanes, Guatemala and Daniel Paseltiner ’16 of Devon, Pa., during the Short Term course “Microcontroller Laboratory.” (Josh Kuckens/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“Understanding how genetic material is packaged and organized in cells is important in understanding genetic diseases, many of which are believed to be linked to misfolding or mispackaging of DNA,” Gould said.

Gould’s is the latest significant grant awarded to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty who are utilizing powerful microscopes in the fields of biology, neuroscience, nanotechnology, and photophysics.

Last year, a team of professors, which included Gould, was awarded $791,480 from the National Science Foundation to purchase a state-of-the-art confocal microscope that uses lasers, computers, and optical elements to render images in thin uniform layers that can be digitally stacked into a three-dimensional representation.

The NSF and INBRE grants are a recognition that ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is home to a cadre of professors conducting important cellular, molecular, and nanoscopic research, said Matthew Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “The fact that many faculty members can make use of the same equipment and technology is especially appealing to grantmakers,” he added.

Gould’s is the latest significant grant awarded to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty who are utilizing powerful microscopes in the fields of biology, neuroscience, nanotechnology and photophysics.

Gould’s research on chromatin requires an ability to resolve images beyond the capabilities of conventional microscopes. That means he has to build new types of microscopes for biological applications — in this case, the study of chromatin.

In its various states the length of chromatin can vary several microns down to several nanometers.

However, conventional microscopes are unable to resolve objects smaller than 200 nanometers. The nanoscope that Gould will build should provide a resolution that is roughly 10 times higher than the powerful confocal microscope the college obtained with its NSF grant.

Gould aims to utilize “stimulated emission depletion” microscopy that will exploit the on/off switching properties of certain light-emitting chemical compounds attached to the chromatin to enhance the resolution of the images.

Gould says the development of such a powerful instrument will help ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students in several ways.

“I expect there to be research and thesis opportunities for students throughout the project centering on the optical technology and also on imaging chromatin and the subsequent data analysis,” Gould said. “The new instrument will also provide a good lab demonstration in my optics course.”

Travis Gould, assistant professor of physics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

In a manner of speaking, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ physicist Travis Gould wants to help people see better.

That’s true for his research interest, nanoscopy, the science of imaging objects at the molecular scale or smaller.

It’s also true for his mission as a teacher. He believes that when learning physics, students often have difficulty connecting the dots between theory and real-world outcomes, and that’s something he’d like to change.

“I’m hoping that, having had many years of experience in the lab, I can help make those connections” for students, says Gould, who started this fall as an assistant professor of physics. “Being in the classroom is something I always find immediately rewarding. I feel like I’m making a difference for somebody.”

Read more profiles of tenure-track faculty new at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in 2013:

• Lydia Barnett, assistant professor of history
• Jonathan Cavallero, assistant professor of rhetoric
• Brooke O’Harra, assistant professor of theater

Gould’s nanoscopy research aims to surmount an obstacle inherent in the properties of light: diffraction. In this case, diffraction refers to the way light waves spread out and interfere with each other when they pass through an opening such as a lens. The smaller the object being examined, the more this interference limits the resolution, or sharpness, of the image.

Recently emerging technologies use finely tuned fluorescent dyes, lasers and computer imaging to beat the diffraction limit, a field that Gould has made his specialty. As a doctoral student at the University of Maine, he worked with physicist Sam Hess on fluorescence photoactivation localization microscopy — FPALM for short — a process that requires molecules to light up one at a time.

“We can image them individually such that their positions can be determined with very high precision,” Gould says. “Then we can plot them together and form an image.”

Most recently, as a postdoctoral fellow in the cell biology department at the Yale University School of Medicine, Gould was part of a team exploring a fluorescence-based technology called STED — stimulated emission depletion. Here, one color of laser light causes certain molecules to light up while a different colored laser suppresses fluorescence in nearby molecules — in effect, better defining the desired image.

Coming from a group of physicists embedded in a biology department, Gould intimately knows the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. His work at Yale included the design and construction of custom STED microscopes, including video-rate and three-dimensional instruments, and the creation of user-friendly software and interfaces for the biologists who would operate the scopes.

“The idea was to give us closer access to our collaborators and an easier time of matching our ideas with their research interests. I actually think it was pretty successful.”

Such collaborations exemplify the connections between concept and result that Gould aspires to make central in his work. “It’s easier to make an impact if you can directly take your ideas about the technology, put them into an application and allow something to be done that couldn’t be done before.”

Coming to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ was coming home for Gould — or at least to within 152 miles of home. He grew up in Sherman Mills, at the southern edge of Maine’s northernmost county, Aroostook. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree at the University of Maine, the state university system’s flagship campus, in Orono.

He’s glad to be in his native state again, and especially at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. “It seemed like a good fit for me to be in a setting where I could teach and do research,” he says. “This feels like a healthy environment in which I can really focus on the science.

“I had my eye out for something to get me back to Maine, so this has worked out pretty well. I couldn’t be happier.”