Dr. S. Bruce King and Dr. Annelise Gorensek-Benitez

Science presents an unending challenge to educators like Bruce King and Annelise Gorensek-Benitez. It keeps advancing—a steady stream of new technologies and new techniques leading to new discoveries.

"We know we need to add that and teach that, but we still meet for the same number of weeks," King says.

When Wake Forest obtained two Seahorse analyzers from Agilent in 2017, Gorensek-Benitez used the technology to re-acquaint herself with the field of metabolism as she worked with King and other colleagues to design new protocols and procedures for the advanced biochemistry lab she was teaching at.

“I learned metabolism as an undergraduate and didn’t touch it for a while just because that’s not my research area,” she says. “So I found myself having to relearn metabolism at the same time I was learning how to use the Seahorse analyzer and design the lab. I found it to be a really useful teaching tool. It reinforced a lot of concepts for me. It definitely gives a face to metabolism.”

The lab is designed to prepare students to do biochemistry research.

“I’m really interested in inquiry-based learning where, rather than having students do cookbook-type lab experiments, you try to make the teaching lab look more like the research lab,”says Gorensek-Benitez. “I know that, in Bruce’s lab, they’ve done a really good job of integrating the Seahorse instrument into that style of class.”

King’s lab is called medicinal chemistry and he describes it as “more open-ended” than the biochemistry lab.

“We’re interested in: How do you come up with a new drug? How do you design the molecule? How do you make the molecule? Does it do what you wanted it to?” King says. “We don’t always know what the answer is going to be. We’ll put the compound in the Seahorse analyzer and see. It’s a nice piece of technology, very well made, and students appreciate that. Some of our students are very interested in biomedical fields, and they find it very interesting to get to work with live cells.”

The Seahorse analyzer takes all of the pages in their text books—all the theoretical discussions about metabolic pathways—and gives students something real to look at.

“Once you get the instrument down, the possibilities are endless,” Gorensek-Benitez says. “You can try an infinite number of molecules, you can play around with the metabolism of the cell, you can try shutting down different parts, or you can use it to show the effectiveness of drugs. Its potential is amazing.”

Both professors are quick to point out, however, that Wake Forest provides an advantageous setting for integrating a cell analysis technology like Seahorse.

“The challenge of working with it is there are a lot of moving parts,” Gorensek-Benitez says. “At an institution like Wake, where you have access to a medical school, access to cell cultures, and good cooperation between departments, we have been able to be successful with it. But if you don’t have access to that, it would be more challenging. Not impossible, but more of a challenge.”

Both also see the effort as worthwhile.

“Ideally, what we would love to have happen, one of these years, is to have one of the compounds that we make in some test in the med-chem lab, show some really interesting activity and then maybe the next year’s class can pick that one up and refine it,” King says.

“If we could have a lab that builds on a previous year’s work, that would be cool. Maybe one year they find a good lead for addressing a metabolic disease like diabetes, but the compound is not very potent or it doesn’t dissolve well. Let’s change it a little bit and see if we can still have the activity but fix the other problems. That’s my dream.