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Elaine Mullen |
Thin Film Specialist
Elaine Mullen
January 2006
Membranes are Elaine Mullen's passion. When she first came to
work at MITRE in McLean, Virginia, through a temporary agency, she
was an artist by day and a scientist at night. At work, Mullen created
conceptual illustrations for documents and presentations. In her
spare time, she stared into her microscope, observing membranes
that resembled the "skins" of living cells.
"I was fascinated with membranes because I was interested in cells,"
says Mullen, who has a bachelor's degree in biology from Virginia
Commonwealth University. "I wanted to know whether thin films made
of glycoprotein [a combination of sugars and protein] were permeable
to certain gases and liquids."
Mullen was encouraged by her sister, a writer for the pharmaceutical
industry, to consider the possibility of using glycoprotein membranes
as sugar-coated drug delivery packages that could target certain
tissues. But there was hardly any published research on the topic
at the time, so Mullen paid a Russian translator several hundred
dollars out of her own pocket to translate the only article she
could find on the sugars of chicken egg white glycoproteins. Soon
thereafter, she discovered that she could make similar films from
glycoproteins in plant juices.
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Mullen's Eureka Moment:
Making the Pig Pink
Mullen discovered glycoprotein films when she was
a freelance illustrator working for scientists at the
Medical College of Virginia. She was trying to dye a
35 mm slide of a pig the color pink, but the ink wouldn't
adhere to the emulsion. "First I tested the dye with
oil, and then I wondered if I could stick it to the
slide with egg white, which is almost pure glycoprotein,"
says Mullen. "I was using a clear custard dish for the
mixture and held it up to look through it. That's when
I noticed the films. It was strictly an accident of
good fortune. Normally, when you use eggs with oil,
they are in a frying pan and you never see the films
from above." |
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Mullen developed her research to a point where a MITRE colleague
prompted her to patent her ideas. Soon after her first patent was
issued, her title changed from artist to biologist in MITRE's Center
for Integrated Intelligence Systems. Then she received a MITRE-sponsored
research grant to learn whether glycoprotein films could capture
pathogens from water.
Mullen had read that carbohydrates in pigeon egg white stick like
Velcro to strains of bacteria that cause urinary infections in humans.
In order to identify similar cases, she asked a summer hire, Baddr
Shakhsheer, to conduct a literature search on surface proteins of
bacterial cells, toxins, and viruses that bind to sugars on host
tissue cells. Shakhsheer put together a spreadsheet that contained
about 500 citations from literature published during the past 20
years on carbohydrate-binding affinities of human pathogens. When
they learned that his compilation was unique, Mullen and Shakhsheer
collaborated with a team of MITRE programmers, web developers, and
artists to produce a web-enabled database, available free online
at http://sugarbinddb.mitre.org.
"We hope researchers can use SugarBindDB to predict infection
by certain bacteria of human and animal tissues that have specific
sugars on their surfaces," says Mullen.
Mullen and Shakhsheer now collaborate with scientists at the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab to evaluate pathogen capture
on films made of various glycoproteins.
Mullen is working on her master's at Johns Hopkins University
and continues her research in thin films. She gives a lot of credit
for her success at MITRE to the company's collaborative culture.
"It's wonderful to tap the rich intellectual resources we have at
MITRE," says Mullen. "And that's what's making this a great time
in my life."
Now, Mullen works as a scientist by day and is an artist/illustrator
at night. Among her creative hobbies are writing and illustrating
stories for children and making stuffed animals to accompany them.
—by David Van Cleave
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