Newtown High School Student

Semifinalist In Prestigious Science Competition

By Martha Coville

Newtown High School senior Dayton Horvath was named a semifinalist in the country’s oldest and most prestigious research competition for high school seniors. Intel Science Talent Search, essentially a science fair, allows high schools students to present their own research to nationally recognized professional scientists.

Dayton said that while he had entered several local and national science fairs as a junior and senior at NHS, he was most excited about being named a semifinalist in the Intel Talent Search. The contest, sponsored by the Intel Corporation, is open to high school seniors who have completed a project at the time of the application process.

Dayton was among the 1,602 applicants to the program, and was named one of the 300 semifinalists. As a semifinalist, he won a $1,000 prize. Intel also donated $1,000 to Newtown High School’s science program.

He had previously presented projects at local science fairs like the Regional Science Horizons, a competition for students in western Connecticut. His success at the regional fair entitled him to attend the statewide Connecticut State Science Fair.

But he said, “I had known about the Intel Science Talent Search for years and starting junior year, working under NHS science teacher Frank LaBanca, my goal was that this would be the project that I would use to apply.”

Dayton said that like fellow Newtown High School student Rebecca Reed, who was nominated for a prize by the Connecticut Technology Council, “I started out in Frank LaBanca’s applied science class. I took classes as a sophomore and did an independent study as a junior.” He said he began the project he presented to the Intel Science Talent Search in December of his junior year.

“I knew I need something with a more practical application for science fairs,” he said, explaining how he came upon his latest research project. Science fair judges prefer projects with “real-world” applications to more abstract projects.

He said, “the spinach farms in California were the prompt for my project,” referring to an e-coli contamination that forced farms in California to recall their spinach crops in 2006. Testing for e-coli, Dayton said, is generally an expensive and time-consuming process. “I thought, why not come up with a simple and quicker and inexpensive way to test for e-coli?” he said.

 “I started this project last November,” he continued, “and after a few months Mr LaBanca and I came up with an idea for finding a quicker and inexpensive e-coli detection system.” He completed his project, which he called “Design, Construction and Testing of a Novel, Rapid, Inexpensive Coliform Detection System” last spring. The coliform bacteria group includes several pathogens, of which e-coli is one.

‘A Quicker and Inexpensive Detection System’

“With spinach,” Dayton said, “you’d be testing the ground water or irrigation system” for e-coli contamination. The conventional testing procedure for e-coli contamination “requires a lab set-up,” he said. A lab technician generally places a test sample of ground or irrigation water under a fluorescence microscope, Dayton said, “which is what my project’s replacing. The fluorescence microscope is too expensive, and not all environmental labs have one. The catch with the regular system is that you have to grow the e-coli over 24 hours,” he said. And even after cultivating a water sample for overnight, a lab technician would still have to determine whether or not the bacteria growing in the water was e-coli. This required a set of five separate tests.

Dayton thought he could find a faster, cheaper, and more simple way to test for e-coli. Among the resources Mr LaBanca provided, he said, was an article about a virus developed in a Japanese university. The T4 bacteriophage, is a virus, not a bacteria, and it “specifically infects e-coli,” Dayton said. The beauty of the T4 bacteriophage is that, having infected an e-coli population, it causes it to glow green under ultraviolet light.

“If I could infect the e-coli,” Dayton said, “I could design a way to take that and look for it.” He began with a 1 to 2 milliliter sample of contaminated water, and added 20 micro milliliters of the T4 bacteriophage. Dayton’s method required an incubation period of only one hour, much faster than the conventional 24 hours required. “Good for field tests,” he said. “You could take your laptop out, and get results within an hour. That’s actually the main purpose, to take it out and run field tests within a one- to two-hour period.”

Dayton’s detection system relies on exposing a sample to ultra violet light. “If there’s no green light, there’s no e-coli,” he said.

‘Something I Built

In My Basement’

But exposing e-coli to ultraviolet light is not as simple as holding a test tube under a ultraviolet bulb. Dayton said he took a device called a colorimeter, which measures the absorbance of particular wavelengths of light by a specific solution, and rebuilt it. A colorimeter exposes a solution to a simple incandescent light. “It uses a light through a sample,” he said, “and measures the transmittance of light through the sample.”

 Dayton said, “I chose to work with the colorimeter because it was one of the most inexpensive devices we had at school. It was inexpensive, and portable, so we rewired it to serve our purpose. I took the colorimeter completely apart,” he said, “rewired it and changed the light, putting in an ultraviolet light.” When all was said and done, he had taken a colorimeter and rebuilt it into a specialized fluorimeter. “This way I’m giving the water sample light, and, because of the T4 bacteriophage, it gives off its own light. That’s the difference between a colorimeter and a fluorimeter,” Dayton said.

Dayton’s method of measuring contaminated water is also extremely accurate. “By comparing the contaminated water to the unaffected sample, you can quantify the amount of e-coli in a given sample. It does take over 24 hours to quantify, but we got it down to being able to count 37 e-coli cells per milliliter.”

By plotting out his data points, Dayton was able to calculate how accurate his measurements were. His first test showed that the fluorimeter measured e-coli contamination with a 99.66 percent precision. “Mr LaBanca didn’t believe that,” he said, “and he made me run it again. But a got an even more accurate number, 99.94 percent, the second time.

“It’s pretty amazing that something I built in my basement had a precision to 5/1000th percent from perfect,” Dayton said.

 

An Impressive Record

In addition to his semifinalist title with the Intel Science Talent Search, Dayton has also won awards with different local, statewide, and national science fairs.

“The goal was to apply to Science Horizons,” he said of his e-coli detection project. Science Horizons is a regional science fair; winners are entitled to present their projects at the Connecticut State Science Fair. Both fairs award separate prizes for “life” and “physical” science projects. At Science Horizons, Dayton was placed in the physical, i.e., nonorganic category, because his project primarily concerned itself with the development of a fluorimeter. Dayton won second place among high school seniors at in physical science at the Science Horizons Fair.

At the Connecticut Science Fair, Dayton won a number of awards. He was awarded first honors, and placed won second place among high school seniors in physical science. “At the {Connecticut] Science Fair,” he said, “You’re supposed to get seven or eight judges, but I had about 15 judges. They were just walking by, and were interested in my project.”

He also won five “special awards,” funded by local corporate sponsors. His special awards included: first place in an Applied Technology contest sponsored by Barnes Aerospace; excellence in microbiology from the Long Island Sound Foundation, Inc; second place from the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society; an award in excellence in analytical technique from Stanley Lessoff; and an award from the Institute of Food Technologists. Altogether, he won more than $2,000 in prize money.

The Connecticut Science Fair provides its top four winners with an all-expense paid trip to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

Although ISEF, like the Intel Science Talent Search competition, is sponsored by the Intel Corporation, it is a different contest altogether. ICEF is the world’s largest international precollege science competition. Last year, more than 1,500 students, in grades nine through twelve, came from 40 countries to attend the fair in Albuquerque, N.M. Dayton said, “Everybody at Intel ICEF, they’re all considered finalists with the program; they’ve already won something.”