Sometimes, inspiration for the biggest scientific advances can come from the most unexpected places.

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when he accidentally grew mold in his laboratory sink. For Helena’s Maria Brown, the source of inspiration was the slobber of a middle-school student’s dog.

Brown, a 2008 Helena High School graduate, isolated a mycobacteriophage, or phage for short, as a project she took on last summer with the help of Montana Tech’s Phagedigging Program.

Phages are viruses that can infect and kill bacteria. Brown and her colleagues at Montana Tech — program director Marisa Pedulla and graduate student Jason Park — hope someday it can be used to treat tuberculosis, which is a serious health threat in the developing world.

Brown may never go down in history like Fleming did for his discovery, but she definitely will have a head start in lab experience on most of her incoming freshman classmates when she enrolls at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., this fall.

And it also has earned her some impressive honors. Brown was the state and regional winner in the Biotechnology Institute’s BioGENEius Challenge, and she was one of 16 people worldwide to be accepted into the organization’s international competition, held in San Diego June 18. She won honorable mention at the competition.

“It’s so fun to go and have your research presented to other people,” Brown said in an interview before leaving for the competition. “To have people know what you’ve done with your research on something is just incredible.”

Brown’s project grew out of work Montana Tech’s Phagedigging Program did last summer with a class of Helena PEAK gifted and talented middle school students, which Brown helped teach.

In the class, students collected samples of common organic material — such as dirt from a field — to be analyzed for phages, which can be found virtually anywhere on earth. They’re so numerous, in fact, that there isn’t a name for the number of them in existence — 1031, or a 1 with 31 zeroes after it.

One of the students brought in her dog’s dish to be analyzed for phages.

The analysis found a phage that killed bacteria that are a distant cousin to the one that causes tuberculosis. It was fittingly named Slobber.

Then came the hard part.

Brown spent the better part of her summer vacation — about four to six hours a day, according to Sandra Wardell, her Helena High honors biology teacher — at Montana Tech under Pedulla’s watchful eye to further purify Slobber and use an electron microscope to isolate it and determine its shape, size and composition.

“She did real nice characterizations to find out it was different from any other phages we have in the lab,” Pedulla said.

According to Pedulla, there are only a few hundred unique phages that have been characterized worldwide. In the five-year history of Montana Tech’s program, only 35 phages have been characterized in over 2,000 student attempts.

Though phages are present everywhere, Brown said it’s an exciting find to uncover one that could be used to treat tuberculosis.

“It’s nice to know I’ve had some kind of effect on just the research in general, knowing I’ve had an effect on the medical aspect of it,” she said.

Phages have long been studied for their potential medical benefits, and according to Park, they’re used to this day in hospitals in Russia and Eastern Europe. In the U.S. and most of the West, phage research died when scientists went the route of antibiotic research.

Phages, however, now hold potential to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And since they can evolve along with the bacteria they can avoid the problem of bacteria growing resistant to them. Montana Tech is one of a handful of U.S. institutions, along with the University of Pittsburgh and New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to resurrect phage research.

Brown’s high school honors biology teacher, Sandra Wardell, said Brown’s accomplishment is probably the first of its kind by a high school student in Montana.

“For a high school student, I think it’s very unusual,” Wardell said. “It’s a hard, long process. You have to be dedicated. You have to be willing to put in the time. Maria was very dedicated to this, real intense and interested.”

She added that Brown did a well-received presentation on her research at an international meeting of phage biologists this year in Madison, Wis.

Brown said that after college, she hopes to work in medical research or in the pharmaceutical field.

According to Pedulla, the phage project has put her well on her way to succeeding in that career.

“It’s a real special project,” she said. “I don’t think you’d find many high school students who’ve done this kind of work.

“She’s a budding scientist. She’s got great potential. I look forward to hearing about her future accomplishments.”