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Jordon Williams ’25 teamed up with biology professor Sabrice Guerrier and marine biology major Brandon Garcia ’23 to produce a scholarly paper titled “TtRET1 Is Required for Mating Initiation in Tetrahymena thermophila.” The project examines how membranes, which form the barriers between the inside and outside of a cell, acquire their shape.

To study this, Guerrier and Williams used the single-cell organism Tetrahymena thermophila because it grows easily in the lab, shares key protein similarities with human cells, and naturally undergoes membrane changes during mating, providing a reliable, repeatable model for examining membrane shape. The group found that a membrane-bending protein is required for the changes in cell shape that occur during mating in Tetrahymena. Membrane shape changes dramatically when cells divide, move, and grow, and alterations in membrane shape are associated with all sorts of diseases.

This experience marked Williams’ first scientific research conference, and he received an award for his poster presentation out of more than 2,000 that were submitted across multiple disciplines within biomedicine. The same research also led to a peer-reviewed publication in the journal Micropublication Biology.

The annual ABRCMS is the American Society for Microbiology's (ASM) conference in support of multidisciplinary science and workforce development. Now in its 24th year, ABRCMS has been the premier multidisciplinary scientific conference for supporting all communities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, including those historically excluded in these fields.

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