Illumination | Spring 2009

Steam is created on-site with redundant delivery systems throughout the building. The lab has its own air filtration, power supplies and decontamination and waste-disposal systems.

Anderson and her team are investigating how Y. pestis builds its own tiny “injection needle” to shoot the host full of proteins called “virulence factors” that kill immune cells and pave the way for Yersinia to undergo rapid replication.

Using bacterial genetics, “we’re working to develop vaccines and treatments that prevent plague by blocking the movement of virulence factors into host cells,” she explains.

Walking into her soon-to-be-operational laboratory, Anderson points out that the most complex part of her work involves the painstaking care with which she handles the tools of her trade.

“With a microscope, centrifuge, incubator, and Yersinia cultures in liquid form, I’m pretty much in business,” she explains. “One of my first projects here at RBL will be to create an artificial mutation that changes or deletes the genes that help Yersinia infect a host.”

After a pending Centers for Disease Control inspection, the lab will “go hot,” Anderson says, triggering a series of worker safeguards that include mandatory showers, and for those who wear eyeglasses, multiple pairs — one for life outside the lab and one for work within.

Negatively pressurized air, she says, will keep “everything inside,” while fume hoods connected to multi-layered high-efficiency particulate, or HEPA, filters will guarantee that not even the smallest bio-particle escapes its research confines.

As for the lab space, “everything is routinely disinfected with hydrogen peroxide,” Stewart explains. “And my personal favorite,” Anderson adds. “Good old Clorox bleach.”

Staying Secure

“I think they look like little Christmas lights,” says George Stewart, reflecting on the blues and greens of chemically fluoresced anthrax spores that sparkle in a photomicrograph.

The veterinary pathobiologist has devoted his career to understanding how Bacillus anthracis uses a protective coating — the spore — to survive harsh conditions, travel, and infect new hosts. Their bright, cheery colors belying a deadly potential, the fluorescent tags help track and identify the spores.

“The spore represents the infectious form of anthrax, which lives in the soil,” Stewart explains. “I study its outermost part to find out how it initiates infection.”

No better example of bioterror may exist than anthrax, which exploded onto the American psyche shortly after the September 11 attacks. Ironically, the offending spores may have come from a national bio-defense laboratory, disseminated through the U. S. mail to high-ranking targets in government and business.

One need look no farther than the anthrax attacks to realize that bioterrorism is all about dissemination, says Saint Louis University infectious disease specialist Terri Rebmann.

“Infect cattle, spread droplets in the air, send spores in the mail: The number of ways a bioterrorist can attack is almost endless,” explains Rebmann, an MU nursing school graduate who specializes in infectious diseases at Saint Louis University’s Institute for Biosecurity.

Published by the Office of Research.