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Germantown High School SMART Team presents antibiotic-resistance research after national conference appearance
Summary
Students from Germantown High School’s SMART Team presented research on penicillin-binding protein 4, described their trip to the ASBMB conference in Chicago and a lab visit at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and said they plan to continue their work next year.
Students from Germantown High School’s SMART Team presented their first-year research on penicillin-binding protein 4 (PBP4), a molecule involved in bacterial cell-wall synthesis and antibiotic resistance, and described taking their poster and protein model to the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) conference in Chicago.
“This was our first year as a team, and we dove into researching penicillin binding protein number 4,” said Lucy Schmidt, a GHS junior and SMART Team co-founder. The students explained they modeled a portion of PBP4 with Jmol software, color-coded domains in their model to indicate active and binding sites, and worked with a mentor, Maya Blau of the Medical College of Wisconsin, who they visited for a lab tour.
The team presented at ASBMB as one of roughly 16 SMART teams nationwide selected to present and said the conference gave them exposure to college-level research and networking with university labs and industry representatives. The students also toured 3D Molecular Designs and learned about printing posters and other tools used in modern molecular-biology labs.
Why it matters: student-led research gives Germantown High School students hands-on experience with laboratory methods, scientific communication and mentorship from higher-education researchers; the students said the experience informed career thinking and will feed next year’s recruitment and project work.
Next steps: the team plans an informational meeting to recruit new members for 2025–26, hopes to fundraise through 3D-printing sales and T-shirt sales, and aims to present at the 2026 ASBMB conference in Washington, D.C.
Details/limits: the students emphasized this was the program’s inaugural year and that some work—such as modeling the full protein—was intentionally limited to a partial structure for manageability at the high-school level.
