The ‘Nanostars’ of PCC’s synthetic biology research program

A group of students and their professor in an undergraduate research program in DNA nanotechnology funded by the National Science Foundation. They are the Nanostars of this program, students who work together on projects regarding using the tools of biology to build materials of the future.

“Our goals are synthetic biology,” said Professor Jillian Blatti. “So in my particular area, I’m involved with education and workforce development to provide a training program for undergraduate students to learn the skills of synthetic biology.”

Blatti and her collaborators—Lisa Franco at UCLA, Deborah Fygenson at UCSB and Paul Rothman at Caltech—design open-ended explorations in the training program, allowing their students to make discoveries.

Over the summer the group has worked together on various experiments, some being uploaded to their YouTube channel. Their synthetic biology research techniques got them involved in a bootcamp at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, where they got one week experience in UCLA’s bioengineering lab and learned from graduate students, postdocs and professors.

There, the Nanostars learned techniques in synthetic biology, setting up biochemical reactions, measuring DNA enzyme activity and designing experiments.

“It’s been really fun to do the same things in my courses and hearing research,” Blatti said.

The team has many accomplishments throughout the years: Eliana Safar and Reina Salman won first place at the Natural Sciences Division Poster Session in 2023 and 2024. Professor Blatti was a Distinguished Woman in Science at Stanford University in 2023 for her work leading PCC students in undergraduate research and having a positive impact on underrepresented students, contributing to equity in STEM education and diversity in the STEM workforce.

“My goals are to gain more research, technical, and research skills, specifically biology research, and to also get successful results in the experiments that we’ve been doing,” said PCC student Gracious Mhlanga.

Meanwhile PCC students Cynthia Khosravian and Megan Rivera, with alumna Eliana Safar want to focus their research for the purpose of localizing medicine.

“With our projects our hope was to hopefully in the future we could use our research in the field of either medicine or just have different applications for it,” said Khosravian.

“In this program, I want to help achieve the larger goal of localizing drug delivery,” said Rivera. “Personally, my goal of entering this program and finishing it was to learn more about the fields that I’m interested in, because, you know, I’m just starting off college and research has always been an interest to me. And I’ve definitely learned a lot about that in my time here, and also just learn what it is like and what it means to be a scientist.”

“I would say the big picture goal for our research is to localize applications for this,” said Safar. “It has really big applications normally in biology and research fields about the structures in localized chemical reactions, but also in health aspects, shares in medicine and the pharmacy industry.”

Fellow alumna Emily Terkazaryan transferred to UCLA, and now hopes to expand her knowledge and growth with her experience from Nanostars.

“At PCC, my major was bio biology, and now at UCLA, it’s going to be molecular, cell and developmental biology,” said Terkazaryan. “My goals are mostly based on keeping going and exploring more opportunities in the field of research trying to get more opportunities like this one specifically in this program and going forward. I am excited to talk about what we’ve done during this program and other events, talking about our research.”

The Nanostars will remember their program fondly, and have learned more about themselves and each other.

“I would say that I’m someone who really enjoys learning about science and about research and how it applies to the real world,” said Returning PCC Student Gracious Mhlanga.

Whether at PCC or beyond, the Nanostars can integrate their experiences into the rest of their lives.

“I think it’s definitely been very eye-opening,” said Khosravian. “With this type of project a lot of us came from different backgrounds. I think we were really able to help each other, build each other’s knowledge base so that we could all kind of be at the same level.”

Students can become Nanostars themselves through PCC’s STEM courses. These courses provide students access to the science associated with Blatti’s experiments.