VT College of Science presents Breakthrough - A Student Research Magazine Vol. 1 No. 1 | Page 4

4

BREAKTHROUGH MAGAZINE | 2014

Revathy
Ramachandran

& Alison

Kernell Burke

Alison Kernell Burke is a 4th year doctoral student studying Microbiology at Virginia Tech from Laurens,
South Carolina. Her co-author, Revathy Ramachandran, is
a 6th year doctoral student at Virginia Tech studying Microbiology from Bangalore, India. Their lab work focuses on quorum sensing, or cell-to-cell (in this case
bacterial) communication. They describe their work as focusing on the “social network” of bacteria.
Virginia Tech’s interdepartmental microbiology graduate program attracted Kernell Burke to
the university as the right place to pursue her degree. She eventually wants to become a professor and
her decision has been heavily influenced by the classes in which she has had the opportunity to act as a
teaching assistant.
Ramachandran was a biotechnology undergraduate, which led to further pursuit of an education in
microbiology. In the future, she hopes to land a post-doctoral position, involving research in a lab in
the United States or abroad. Currently she is an assistant professor and can see herself teaching in the
future, or perhaps starting her own research lab.
Kernell Burke and Ramachandran undertook this novel research opportunity in order to
attempt to understand the network that allows more than one bacterial cell to do the same action at
the same time. They were interested in the coordination of bacteria after they are fully grown. This
communication between cells, called quorum sensing, is an area of research that is growing as rapidly as
is the technology that allows the research to take place.
Kernell Burke studied a bacterium which infects oysters. This bacterium is a human pathogen that
can result in food poisoning if the infected oysters are consumed raw or undercooked. The bacterium
Ramachandran researched causes disease in corn plants, damaging the stalk of corn that is infected and
killing the plant.
One aspect of their research was the use of a fairly new technology called next generation sequencing. This technology uncovered almost 200 genes within Ramachandran’s bacterium regulated by
quorum sensing. Before their collective work-study, only two genes regulated by quorum sensing were
known to exist in the corn plant bacterium studied. The data collected by using the technology led
Kernell Burke and Ramachandran to discover that a large chunk of the genome is controlled by quorum
sensing.
The research has been presented by the pair at conferences across the East Coast and the
greater United States.
“Quorum Sensing: The Bacterial Social Network” describes their research.