The origin story | Structural Nucleic Acid Anticancer Research Society

The origin story: Two examples of branch-starting

Once upon a time there was a little girl.

She was very interested in science and wanted to learn more about research.

Pipetting a solution

She had the opportunity to help on a Se-nucleic acid crystallography project, growing beautiful nucleic acid crystals complexed with small molecules. In the process, she learned a lot about nucleic acids, base pairing, the theory of crystallography, the unique advantages that X-ray diffraction and neutron diffraction can provide for structure determination, and the importance of structure discovery for designing therapeutics to treat diseases.

She presented what she worked on with her research partner at a high school science fair competition and won 2nd place.

Poster presentation for the Walton High School Science Fair

One selenium-modified nucleic acid protein crystal well from the crystallization experiment (Jan. 2019)

She was very excited. With encouragement from her research mentor, she submitted an abstract to the 2019 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) conference.

Going in for the presentation (Jul. 2019)

She presented about the Se-modified nucleic acid crystallography technique and how one selenium-functionality introduced on a synthesized nucleic acid sequence can lead to broader crystallization conditions, faster crystallization, and higher quality diffraction data.

Presenting about the selenium-modification technique for the crystallization of nucleic acids at the conference (Jul. 2019)

At the presentation, though she was a bit daunted at first, she became much more at ease after getting into the flow of the presentation, sharing with everyone the importance of this nucleic acid crystallization technique. At the end, she was surprised and happy that the audience members, professors and graduate students, were supportive of her.

Attending the conference that week was a crazy beautiful experience for her. Everyone was so excited about crystallography and structural biology. People were growing crystals in outer space. People were showcasing their vanguard instruments, pipetting crystallization plates with lightning speed. It was an entire realm of crystallography out there that she had not known before, and it was quite amazing.

Attending the poster sessions (Jul. 2019)

After coming back from the conference, she knew that this crystallography research needed to be shared with other students. So, she resolved to start a crystallography research club named Structural Nucleic Acid Anticancer Research Society or STARS.

TIMBER RIDGE

The programs were simple: (1) Grow protein crystals and (2) attend the American Crystallographic Association conference. The issue was, of course, that there were no resources to grow such protein crystals. Additionally, there was no funding for fellow students to attend the ACA conference. So she settled with the next best thing: Grow inorganic crystals.

2019 ACA conference session that she had presented at (Jul. 2019)

Fortunately, at the ACA conference session she had attended and presented at, there was a professor by the name of Dr. Jason Benedict (in the red shirt) who shared with everyone about the annual US Crystal Growing Competition that he and the University of Buffalo had recently began hosting. She immediately competed in the competition and won 2nd place.

The aluminum potassium sulfate (alum) crystal that she grew and won 2nd place in the quality crystal category in the 2019 US Crystal Growing Competition (Spring 2020)

Winning the competition was exhilarating, and feeling that this could be an amazing opportunity for K-12th students to grow their own inorganic crystals, practice their critical thinking skills, their analytical skills, observation skills, and note-taking skills from the comfort of their homes (during COVID), she and her STARS team decided to launch their own crystal-growing competition for local students, and she even made a video advertising the event.

"Mystical Realm of Science," where a child works on growing aluminum potassium sulfate (alum) crystals (Jan. 2020)

She led her team to cold email over 40 principals and teachers to see which school(s) would be interested in collaborating with them on hosting the competition for their students. Several responded their disinterest while the majority never responded.

Perseverance is key in the face of challenges. All it takes is one “yes.” Upon hearing about the competition news, her younger brother’s STEM Lab teacher at Timber Ridge Elementary school immediately took interest and agreed to the collaboration soon afterwards.

Flyer for Timber Ridge Elementary School students to sign up for the crystal-growing competition. (Spr. 2021)

The competition was simple: Students followed the introductory videos provided by STARS, filling out their Crystal Journals and growing crystals of their own choosing, such as salt or alum. After the crystal-growing period ends, the students submit pictures and videos of their crystal as well as a pdf of their Crystal Journals onto the online submission portal. The crystal submissions are then judged, and winning students are awarded.

Hosting the competition experience for the students was extremely empowering. The setting provided students a chance to learn and practice science, while show-casing their best work. For instance, the champion of the competition had in three weeks' time single-handedly grown 10 massive alum (aluminum potassium sulfate) crystals that were each infused with different colors. He recorded data points tracking the growth of each crystal, and his Crystal Journal was exceptionally detailed and discussed a variety of observations, discussions, and conclusions. He was a 2nd grader.

One of the three green crystals (total, three green crystals, three red crystals, and four blue crystals) submitted by the champion of the competition (Spr. 2021)

One of the data sheets of three data sheets, which recorded the growth of four green crystals, as submitted by the champion of the competition (Spr. 2021)

Other students grew salt crystals with high purity and even large copper sulfate crystals.

Copper sulfate crystal, also grown by a 2nd grader at Timber Ridge Elementary School. (Spr. 2021)

Even a teacher competed in the teacher category and grew a geode-like structure:

Geode-like crystal grown by Ms. Judy Osborne for the teacher crystal-growing category (Spr. 2021)

These competitions brought out the adventurous, creative side of students. Seeing the outstanding results from the competition, the happiness of the students, and the excitement of the teachers, she and her team were now certain that crystal-growing was one of the ways to spur creativity and scientific discovery in students. Crystals were both beautiful yet scientific, captivating students’ interest in the crystal-growing endeavor and helping them practice their scientific principles at the same time.

Since this first crystal-growing competition outreach event, STARS has hosted two additional annual crystal-growing competitions, three annual crystal-growing summer camps, and attended two STEM teacher conferences to share with teachers the importance and usefulness of crystal-growing for exciting students in science.

DR. LIU

A couple of years of hosting crystal-growing programs have passed, and it was now 2023. The STARS high school club was now managed by the girl’s younger sister. The high school club leader was doing a fantastic job helping her students grow inorganic crystals and broaden the range of crystal-growing experiments STARS members can work on.

Meanwhile, the older sister was in college now. She had thought about bringing STARS to her university, and it was constantly in her mind, but it was difficult to get it started.

Susanna Huang (left), Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan (middle), and Selina Huang (right) at the American Crystallographic Association conference (Jul. 2023)

The two sisters attended the 2023 ACA conference, where the younger sister gave an oral presentation about recent STARS club and outreach activities (which she later credits to how she overcame her social anxiety during presentations).

The younger sister engaging with the audience to answer questions they had after she gave her presentation at the ACA conference (Jul. 2023)

Meanwhile, the older sister finally met the ACA organizers who had supported STARS and had donated over $700 worth of competition awards for the STARS 2022 crystal-growing competition. The ACA organizers expressed their excitement for what STARS was doing, and it reminded the older sister of what she used to do for her STARS members and student competitors and how she taught them to grow crystals and prepared events for fellow students to attend.

Giving a poster presentation about the selenium nucleic acid crystallization technique (Jul. 2023)

She later had the honor of giving a short talk at the dinner banquet at the end of the conference telling the conference attendees and corporate representatives the significance of selenium functionalities on DNAs to selectively stabilize their alpha and beta forms to enable large, rapid, and high-quality nucleic acid crystal growth for structure determination. At the end, she briefly mentioned how STARS was doing currently and reiterated her thanks to ACA’s support for STARS’ previous crystal-growing program.

TMT presenters (Jul. 2023)

The exhibition space and the conference attendees (Jul. 2024)

Attending and presenting at the 2023 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) conference had renewed her energy and reinvigorated her with a newfound sense of urgency and importance for sharing with others about crystallography research. Structural biology is important for learning about the biological world on the molecular level. Without it, people would have never known about the ribosome machinery, the significance of tRNA, how CRISPR/Cas9 cleaves its nucleic acid targets, and what DNA even looks like in the first place. These were all possible through structural biology, specifically crystallography. Additionally, not only is structural biology important for discovering structures, but it is also equally, if not more, important for designing and discovering structure-based therapeutics (e.g. small molecule inhibitors, PROTACS, aptamers, etc.) to treat diseases like cancer.

As soon as she got back to university in the following fall semester, she quickly began planning. She gathered the top students from the general chemistry lab she was TA’ing and began introducing to them the idea of STARS, the concept of crystallography, and why it is important for therapeutic drug design.

She was knowledgeable enough about the general workflow for crystallography but had no macromolecular crystal-growing experience except for the small amount in high school. She needed a way to teach her students how to grow protein crystals.

Then she recalled: She had met an Emory structural biology professor during the conference. His name was Dr. Liu.

Dr. Liu of Emory teaching STARS members and GT students during the first crystallography workshop (Jan. 2024)

With the help of the Open Biology Lab at Georgia Tech, she was able to reserve a vacant undergraduate biology lab, and it was there, that Dr. Liu and his student assistant taught the STARS members and additional Georgia Tech students about how to grow their first lysozyme protein crystals.

Two days later, she and her team checked on their protein crystals. They were so large and beautiful. When her students saw the crystals, they were so excited and half-freaked out over how crazy it was that they grew those crystals themselves. She, especially, was also so excited, exhilarated, and happy. This was the first time in the entire history of STARS that STARS members were able to finally grow protein crystals of their own.

First ever protein crystal (STARS Atlanta branch) in the entire history of STARS (January 22nd, 2024),

as grown by Maya Leveille (STARS member)

It was five years since the creation of the STARS high school club, the time where she had first wanted protein crystal growth to be part of STARS club curriculum. With hard work, creativity, connections, dedication, and inspiration from ACA conferences, it was finally reality.

Beautiful lysozyme protein crystals grown at the workshop event (Jan. 2024)

as grown by Selina Huang and Diego Gonzalez (STARS members)

Since then, she and her team have hosted three other crystallography workshops based on the protein crystallization experiment procedure taught by Dr. Liu, received over $800 worth of crystallization plates from Hampton Research to support their crystallography workshop events, involved several faculty and post-docs in STARS workshop lunches and presentations, organized skills-building and lecture series sessions, started learning and teaching how to build and refine macromolecular models from density maps with PHENIX and Coot, and collaborated and visited the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to see and learn how protein crystallography, macromolecular deuteration, and neutron diffraction are performed to solve macromolecular complexes for structural biology.

B2 and D5 of crystallization plate 3, grown by students Krithi I and Tvishi A at the Aug. 2024 Crystallography workshop (Aug. 2024)

A3 and D1 of crystallization plate 7, grown by students Syon and Ruthi F. at the Aug. 2024 Crystallography workshop (Jul. 2024)

Additionally, over the 2024 ACA conference, STARS was able to raise over $800 from corporations and conference attendees to run the spring 2025 high school crystallography workshop for high school students.

Recognizing the importance of attending and presenting at ACA conferences, from both her personal experience and her sister’s experience, she has implemented the STARS Travel Grant policy to encourage STARS members to attend and present at ACA conferences not only to practice their presentation skills and ability to engage with a scientific audience at a national conference, but also to network with professors and industry leaders, forge connections crucial for possible outreach or research collaborations, and be inspired and rejuvenated with energy from the conference to drive outreach and club programs in STARS branches in the following school year.