Swartz partners with high school students to create “fluorescent proteins”

Sequoia High School students are the first to reproduce a technique for creating glowing jellyfish proteins outside of a living organism, with the help of Stanford Professor Jim Swartz and Cem Albayrak, a Stanford graduate student in Swartz’s lab. The professor and his graduate student went to the four biotechnology classes at Sequoia High School to teach the experiment with the students.

The goal of the students’ experiment was to create green fluorescent protein (GFP) outside of a living organism. GFP glows under fluorescent light and can be used to “mark” proteins in living organisms. Swartz had developed a technique to harvest the insides of cells by ripping the cell walls apart. Swartz then puts the insides in a test tube which allows him to activate protein synthesis.

“Normally, GFP is made inside living cells, which poses challenges to researchers because the cell walls act as a barrier to many molecules,” says Swartz. “It’s like having this gigantic cell; the whole reactor is one large cell without any walls”.

K. C. Jones, the teacher of Sequoia’s biotechnology class, said he was skeptical when Swartz contacted him with the idea to teach the growth of fluorescent proteins. “It is very rare for something to work the first time you try it out with a hundred high school students,” Jones said. “But it worked amazingly well.”