Grad student hears calling to share science with youths
Newswise — As odd as it may sound, Nicole Tuttle looks back on becoming a Teach for America volunteer as almost arrogant.
For two years after receiving her bachelor’s degree, she taught earth and physical sciences to sixth-graders in an under-resourced middle school in Atlanta. “I was a total novice at teaching — and sixth-graders — in a brand-new state,” said Tuttle, a 2010 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at UChicago. “All of my students were black; I was white. It was very eye-opening, to say the least.” Nevertheless, Tuttle earned accolades from her principal and her school district for her leadership, resourcefulness and commitment to her students. “When I was in college, 9/11 happened and it brought out this surge of patriotism in me that I didn’t really know was there,” she said. It was also when two affirmative-action lawsuits against the University of Michigan, where Tuttle majored in chemistry, challenged the right of universities to consider race in admissions procedures in order to achieve a diverse student body. “Everybody on campus was talking about that,” Tuttle recalled, “talking about race and privilege and so I had a really strong drive to make a change, to do something to give back to my country and try to decrease the achievement gap.” Tuttle arrived on campus during the summer of 2008, before her official enrollment, so that she could do a training rotation in the laboratory of Joseph Piccirilli, Associate Professor in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Piccirilli’s brand of research, the amenities of Hyde Park and her husband’s residency at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, all made UChicago a logical choice for graduate study in chemistry.
She spent 10 weeks that summer studying the dynamics of the hepatitis D virus ribozyme, a virus that promotes development of the disease. More recently, she has been working on a project aimed at determining which metal atoms in the spliceosome are responsible for driving the chemistry of RNA molecules.
Critical cellular machinery “The splicesome is a critical piece of machinery in the cells,” Tuttle explained. After DNA is transcribed into RNA, the spliceosome cuts that RNA at precise positions and re-stitches it back together in a new way. The transcripts need to be precisely spliced “because if you mess that up, you’re not going to be producing the correct gene products. And sure enough, splicing defects have been implicated in a number of human diseases.” These are but two projects in the Piccirilli lab, which studies a variety of catalytic RNAs. “Joe has made some important discoveries about the group I intron, one of the first ribozymes, one of the first catalytic RNAs discovered,” Tuttle said. “In addition to that he does a lot of synthetic chemistry in the lab, and that’s what allows us to look at single atoms in these gigantic RNAs and see what effects they have on molecules.”
Catalytic RNA is one of the critical pieces of the molecular-evolution puzzle, which Tuttle finds especially intriguing. How did the first molecules of life evolve? “You may have heard of the RNA world hypothesis,” she said. “This is the idea that before life had DNA that carried genetic information, it likely used RNA, which can both carry genetic information and catalyze chemical reactions. So it’s possible that RNA was the first bio-molecule out there that was doing these things.” As an elementary school student, Tuttle thought science was all about answering multiple-choice questions from a textbook, not working with the yeast colonies, RNA molecules and X-ray films of her daily routine. A middle-school chemistry class changed all that. Now she feels drawn toward both research and science education. “I really loved teaching. It was fantastic to bring science to the new generation,” she said. For now, “I just want to do good science here and see where it takes me.”
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