The award, which is granted by the organization to only four of its approximately 3,000 members each year, included a $600 travel stipend that will enable Modla to attend the society's annual conference in Albuquerque in August, where she will present her abstract. It also, she said, will further her work and help her get recognized in her field.
“Being a microscopist wasn't really something I planned,” Modla said, “but after getting introduced to the field in graduate school, I developed an interest in it.”
While pursuing her studies on marine life forms in the graduate school laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she spent a lot of time looking at crustacean shells under electron microscopes, microscopy also was something at which Modla became highly skilled--and, as it turned out, versatile. When she graduated two years ago, DBI snapped her up, and she has been busy studying a variety of samples ever since.
Now typically juggling eight to 10 projects at a time, Modla says her work is always interesting, and a brief list of samples she regularly encounters--viruses, bacteria, animal cells, plant cells, fungi and tissues--bears this out. “We've even looked at crabs before,” she said. “We look at anything biological.”
Modla, who--along with DBI colleagues Kirk Czymmek, associate professor of biological sciences and director of the Bio-Imaging Center at DBI; Deborah Powell, a Bio-Imaging research associate; and David Scheiblin, a biology graduate student at UD--uses a scanning electron microscope to study viruses in marine ecosystems, received the MSA award specifically for the abstract she wrote and submitted outlining a new and more accurate way of counting marine viruses, particularly ones that are closely clustered.
“To better understand the importance of viruses in marine ecosystems, some microbial ecologists study the abundance of viruses in a variety of environments,” Modla said. “Most often, this is performed by staining viruses with a fluorescent dye and using a fluorescence microscope to count the viruses, which appear as small, bright dots.”
As the size of viruses falls below the limit of resolution of a fluorescence microscope, however, Modla explained, two very closely spaced viruses will appear as a single dot. By developing a fast, simple method of counting viruses with a scanning electron microscope, which has a resolution one thousand times greater than that of the fluorescence microscope, Modla and her colleagues improved both the accuracy and speed of counting the viruses.
“Now even viruses that are directly next to each other can be discriminated,” she said, “which allows for a much more accurate estimation of viral abundance.”
Though not a new technique, she added, the discovery is a new application of the existing technique to microbial ecology.
“Some microbial ecologists want to look at the abundance of various viruses in the marine environment, because these viruses play a big role,” Modla said. “They basically infect bacteria, so getting an accurate count of them is very important.”
Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photo by Kathy Atkinson