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Sully students on cacti project
By Jason Hennington / Special to the Avalanche
Thanks to a Welch Foundation grant, four Sul Ross State University students are participating in an undergraduate research project on cacti.
Sami Cohen of San Antonio, Clint Holsomback of Houston, Josh Rousselow from Klamath Falls, Ore., and Kaycee Watt from Claresholm, Alberta, Canada, are working with Dr. Martin Terry, an assistant professor of biology, studying cacti portrayed in cave paintings in Baja California.
The cave paintings, which are believed to be 7,500 years old, depict people, game animals and cacti. Normally cave paintings have a sacred meaning and are vital to the people who painted them, but the cacti are an unusual addition.
"We are trying to determine what the cacti are doing in the paintings," Terry said.
The students are trying to find the answer to this question by analyzing chemical compounds in the cacti.
"We're looking for anything with bioactivity," Terry said. "Antibiotic activity would be amazing and medically significant."
Any new compound would be a significant discovery for the class, and would invite more interest to the students.
"I found the interaction between the people and the cacti interesting," Rousselow said. "Why did they take so much time to put these cacti in their paintings?"
The students use a high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) instrument to conduct research on samples.
"The HPLC gives us an idea of what is in the sample," Cohen said. "It separates the individual compounds."
Normally this would be graduate-level research, but at Sul Ross these four undergraduates are participating in such work.
"I like the fact that I have the opportunity to do this as an undergraduate," Cohen said.
All discoveries found during this research will be documented in a publication, and the students will be given credit as coauthors.
"I'm interested in the prospect of something that has a purpose," Holsomback said. "This is a quality experience for undergraduate work."
Terry will present preliminary results of the students' research at a March 28 symposium in Vancouver at the annual conference of the Society for American Archaeology. The title of his presentation is "Psycho-active Cacti in North American Archaeology."
For more information, contact Martin Terry, 432-837-8113 or mterry@sulross.edu.
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