Two students at NHTI-Concord’s Community College have solved a problem that has affected the school’s Biology II class for years.
Noah Ford and Sophia Lemay refined a complex method to successfully extract DNA from a bacteriophage, allowing future classes to make new virus discoveries.
In NHTI’s Biology II curriculum, students must isolate a virus from a soil sample as part of the SEA-PHAGES (Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science) Discovery Protocol. An important step of this process is to extract DNA from a bacteriophage — a virus that reproduces within bacteria — but traditional extraction methods were not providing adequate quantities of DNA.
NHTI professor Beth Wilkes proposed this problem in her genetics class, suggesting that students could solve it as a capstone project. Ford and Lemay, who were lab partners, took the bait.
“We’ve been buddies ever since,” Lemay said.
Try and try again
After trying numerous commercial extraction kits, Ford and Lemay tested an unconventional method that had never given consistent results.
“At that point, we kind of ran out of faith,” Lemay said.
This method required even more steps and precision than past techniques, but Ford and Lemay polished the protocol.
“We were short on time… then we did repeated trials, and it worked multiple times,” Lemay said.
View Ford and Lemay’s research posters among the 2025 NHTI Student Capstone Projects.
NHTI’s faculty supported the intensive capstone project by receiving grant funding for the students’ work from New Hampshire INBRE (IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence), and by coordinating Ford and Lemay’s trips to the University of New Hampshire, Manchester to use the college’s nanodrop spectrophotometer — a machine that measured the concentration and purity of DNA samples.
“This was the first time they’d ever thrown a bunch of equipment at me and said ‘Go get em,’” Ford said.
Following their paths
The project was more self-guided than anything the students had experienced previously, but the autonomy allowed them to get a real taste for a career in bio-manufacturing.
“It took until this project for the light bulb to go off,” said Lemay, who had followed in her brothers’ footsteps — attending NHTI as a fast-track to complete general education college credits. But the capstone project revealed that this type of work is her true passion. She graduated from NHTI with an associate degree in biology in May.
Ford knew he had a calling for science at a young age.
“My 10-year-old dream is to do research of some kind,” said Ford, who will graduate with an associate degree from NHTI this fall.
Both Lemay and Ford plan to continue studying biology at universities in New Hampshire.
After completing this impressive capstone project, the two budding scientists have become close friends and regularly attend conferences in their field together. They will present on their DNA extraction process at the New Hampshire INBRE Annual Meeting in August.
