The Clarion-Ledger

The Clarion-Ledger

Some Mississippi State University students have discovered – and named – a new life form, a previously unknown organism discovered on campus in a mud puddle last September.

The newly classified organism – Ptolemeba bulliensis, a unicellular microscopic protest – was scooped from a courtyard between Harned Hall and its adjoining annex, and then collected, isolated and classified by three undergraduates under the leadership of Matthew Brown, an authority on the evolution of amoeboid microbes.

Brown, an assistant professor at MSU, heads the Evolutionary Protistology Laboratory in Harned Hall, home of MSU's biological sciences department.

A second, closely related protist, Ptolemeba noxubium, was also collected from the Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge, located approximately 15 miles south of campus.

The organisms' genus – Ptolemeba – honors MSU's first bulldog mascot, said Pam Watson of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The junior microbiology major was lead author of the scientific paper about the discovery of the protists recently published in the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology.

In her spare time, Watson is a member of Maroon VIP, or Visitor Information Program. Participating taught her more about the history of MSU and led to her choice of the genus name.

"We take care of visitors who come to campus," Watson said. "When I went to Maroon VIP meetings, I learned that the first 'Bully' was named Ptolemy, and I thought that would be fitting for us to name the genus for something about the campus.

"It catches your attention; you want to know more about it and it highlights the history of Mississippi State."

Watson, along with senior medical technology major Stephanie Sorrel of Warner Robins, Georgia, and junior chemistry major Nicholas Lee of Brandon, were working in Brown's laboratory when the samples were collected. They participated in documenting and classifying the protists, though Lee was unable to continue the project through the completion of the scientific paper.

Since the students collected the organisms, Brown said they deserved the opportunity to experience the entire scientific process of organism discovery, from isolating samples to isolating the protists' DNA to drafting the highly technical journal submission.

"While the paper process was one of the most stressful experiences of my adult life, it changed what I wanted to do," Watson said. "I was pre-med, but now I've found my niche. I want to go to grad school, get my Ph.D. and do research. I want to be a professor."

Because most of his contemporaries are not studying protists, Brown has especially enjoyed training student-scientists to investigate the tremendous biodiversity found in the group, he said.

"I was showing the students the morphological and molecular techniques to identify the organisms and place them on the phylogenic tree," he said. "The 'aha moment' came in early November when all three of the students were working in concert. Each isolated an organism, and each did the gene sequencing analysis, and all the organisms were so closely related.

"Things just don't happen that way," Brown said. "It was serendipity."