A cheerleader volunteering for a citizen-science project helped discover a novel bacterium from a seat at a football stadium at Coronado High School in San Diego.
Members of a citizen-science group called Science Cheerleader helped gather microbe samples by swabbing the school’s stadium seats and shared the samples with a project known as MERCCURI. Scientist David Coil and his team published a paper in PeerJ on Nov. 12 that names the new yellow-orange critter Porphyrobacter Mercurialis.
“Give me a P, Give me an O, Give me…. a yellow-orange member of the Erythrobacteracae family.” For the sake of cheering, might need to shorten the bacteria’s name to Porphy. Coil told us that many new bacteria are named every month, and that Porphy is not highly unusual. The bacterium is related to marine creatures and may have wafted from the nearby ocean to the stadium.
Just to add to the fun, the novel bacteria spent some time growing on the International Space Station, as part of the project. Porphy was not a standout – not faster or slower than the others. Just middle-of-the-road.
Transmission electron microscopy of exponential phase culture of new bacterium in lysogeny broth. Photo used with Creative Commons license from PeerJ.
Taylor Hooks is the ex-professional cheerleader, and volunteer with Science Cheerleader, who sampled seats at the stadium. “I was the only person collecting samples at the event, so it must have been a sample I collected. It makes me very happy to have contributed in some way to a discovery of this nature. It’s really amazing,” she told us in an email interview.
Microbiologist Coil is one of the lead scientists on the project and explained that this national citizen-science project gathered candidate microbes to fly in microgravity on the ISS. The team selected 48 “candidates” for a growth competition. More information on MERCCURI here.
Hooks has been a volunteer for SciCheer for five years. She lives in Southern California and works in the medical imaging field, but is currently studying for her masters’ in business administration.
Coil works at the University of California, Davis, in the Eisen Lab. Citizen science is a particular passion of his and of lab leader Jonathan Eisen. The lab sent members to a national conference on Citizen Science in San Jose in February.
Coil admits cheering himself when he knew the paper was being published. He chose the name “mercurialis” for two reasons. The bacteria was not easy to grow and mercurial means temperamental. But he also liked using a part of MERCCURI for the bacteria’s name to honor the program.
Another cheerleader happy about the microbe is the woman who carries the mantle of “Science Cheerleader” founder – Darlene Cavalier. She is also the founder of SciStarter, the organization that recruited thousands of people to participate in the microbe collection effort. Darlene wrote at her site, “Our goal is to spur even more people to get involved. SciStarter created partnerships with the Science Cheerleaders (an organization of 300-plus current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders with science careers) and Pop Warner Little Scholars, a nonprofit youth football and cheer group serving more than 400,000 athletes. Both groups helped promote Project MERCCURI. Learn more at www.scistarter.org.
Editor’s note: Sally James appeared on a panel about citizen-science microbiology at the 2015 Citizen Science Association conference in San Jose. She received partial travel reimbursement from the Eisen Lab.
