This the second part of three part case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this part, we do a bit of forensics to see how well their sequencing worked and to see if we can anything that could help ...
This the third part of case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this last part, we use the results from an automated comparison program to determine if the students cloned any genes at all and, if so, which genes ...
A few days ago, I wrote about a cool project that some high school students did where they used DNA sequencing to identify seafood. One question that came up from one of my commenters was how a school would start a project like this. I'm totally biased, but I think ...
One of my colleagues has a two part series on FinchTalk (starting today) that discusses uncertainty in measurement and what that uncertainty means for the present and Next Generation DNA sequencing technologies. I've been running into this uncertainty myself lately. I have always known that DNA sequencing errors occur. This ...
I get asked this question often enough and now that's it's come up again, it seems that I might as well answer it once and for all and get it over with. First, I want to change the question. Of course they don't need to learn programming. A better question ...
Part I. The back story from the genome record Together, these five posts describe the discovery of a novel paramyxovirus in the Aedes aegyptii genome and a new method for finding interesting anomalies in GenBank. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do ...
The University of Nevada in Las Vegas is looking for a few good undergraduates to come do research this summer in environmental microbiology. Environmental microbiology goes way beyond hot springs bacteria and Yellowstone Park. At UNLV, you can do science in the desert. It almost makes me wish I was ...
The NIH has some extra money to fund summer research for students and teachers. Check it out! The NIH and grantee partner institutions have a unique opportunity to support summer research experiences for high school and college students, as well as elementary, middle, and secondary school science teachers, and faculty ...
Are you interested in global health? The Washington Global Health Alliance is looking for an education professional, with a life science or science education background (BS or higher) to help train faculty and students at the high school level. The complete announcement is below, the appointment would be at the ...
Wow! One of my commenters, Ms. Baker, suggested an entirely new way that scientists can help with science education. The only requirement is that a science class have their own blog. So, if your science class has a blog, let me know, so I can share the URL and maybe ...
How can you extend a blood typing activity with an active learning approach? The blood typing lab, part I. What went wrong? and why? Blood typing part II. Can this laboratory be saved? The learning objective: To understand the inheritance of blood type. In this activity students: 1. Identify which ...
PubMed is an on-line database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that contains information from scientific literature. Most of the information is related to medical research. To search PubMed, you use a program called Entrez. You go to the NCBI, select PubMed from the menu, type words into ...
For those of you who may have been wondering where I've been, these past few weeks have seen me grading final projects, writing a chapter on analyzing Next Gen DNA sequencing data for the Current Protocols series, and flying back and forth between Seattle and various meetings elsewhere in the ...
Reposted from the original Digitalbio. About a decade ago, I took a fascinating summer course at the UW on bioethics. We read about the Nuremburg trials and the Geneva conventions. We learned about horizon problems and eugenics. And we discussed lots of challenging scenarios with genetic testing, autonomy, family relationships ...
From NWABR: Would you like to integrate ethics into your science classroom, but aren't sure which topics to address or teaching methods to use? Do you feel that ethics is important to include in science education, but feel uncomfortable with your own lack of background knowledge? Have you observed how ...
Modified from the original post. Playing around with molecular structures is one of the more entertaining activities that you can do with digital biology. I've become totally entranced with molecular structures, both because they're a fascinating art form and because every structure has its own story. I learned this because ...
I had some strange notions when I made the jump from working at the lab bench to teaching at the white board. I thought good teaching meant interesting lectures. And I was completely unaware that people actually conducted research in science education. If I had been asked about education research ...
Imagine a simple hike in a grassy part of South America. You hear a rattle and feel a quick stab of pain as fangs sink into your leg. Toxins in the snake venom travel through your blood vessels and penetrate your skin. If the snake is a South American rattlesnake ...
I've been writing quite a bit this week about my search for a cross platform spread sheet program that would support pivot tables and make pie graphs correctly. This all started because of a bug that my students encountered in Microsoft Excel, on Windows. I'm not personally motivated to look ...
I think all of us; me, the students the OO advocates, a thoughtful group of commenters, some instructors; I think many of us learned some things that we didn't anticipate the other day and got some interesting glimpses into the ways that other people view and interact with their computers ...
Welcome Bio256 students! This quarter, we're going to do some very cool things. We are going to use bioinformatics resources and tools to investigate some biological questions. My goal, is for you to remember that these resources exist and hopefully, be able to use them when you're out working in ...
Confused about terms like "autonomy" and "beneficance" and their relationship to biomedical research? The Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR) is offering a short course at the University of Washington, Feb. 29th and March 1st, on Ethics in Science. Registration details and a description are below. An Ethics Shortcourse February ...
A little over ten years ago, Dr. Elaine Johnson obtained funding from the National Science Foundation to start Bio-Link, an Advanced Technology Education center, focused on biotechnology. Since that time, Dr. Johnson has become a national leader in biotech education, enlisting the country's top educators and industry captains to ensure ...
I was pretty impressed to find the swine flu genome sequences, from the cases in California and Texas, already for viewing at the NCBI. You can get them and work them, too. It's pretty easy. Tomorrow, we'll align sequences and make trees. Activity 3: Getting the swine flu sequence data ...
tags: I meant for this to be a three part series, but in part II, I learned that one more experiment had to be done. I had to know if the articles I found in PubMed Central were the same articles that I found in PubMed. Part I and part ...
tags: This three part series covers the problem of finding scientific articles, compares results from a few different methods, and presents instructions for the best method. A day in the life of an English physician In April, I had the great fortune to attend (and speak at) a conference on ...
tags: This is the second part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician Today, we do an experiment with PubMed and PubMed Central to determine the best way to ...
tags: This is the third, and last part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician and the second part, where I compare different methods, here. Today, I will show ...
I'm in Berkeley right now at the annual Bio-Link Summer Fellows forum. We're getting to hear talks from people in the biotech industry, listen to enthusiastic instructors describe their biotech programs and ideas, and try out new educational materials. Yesterday, two speakers (Damon Tighe and Jason Baumohl) from the Joint ...
Last night, the phone rang at 9:22 pm. I quickly glanced at the caller ID. Hmmm. Why is the Seattle School district calling us at this time of night? Apparently the swine flu has come to Seattle and the school district thought we should know. Those messages are helpful if ...
When I was a post-doc, I spent a few months seriously thinking about changing careers and teaching high school. I might have followed through on that plan, too, but I didn't know how to pay for it. Today, if you have a background in science, technology, math, or engineering, you ...
It only takes a quick trip to the grocery store to see that familiar jobs are vanishing. Unless you're in Oregon, grocery store checkers are going the way of gas station attendants, travel agents, and secretaries. Jobs are changing, new jobs require different skills, and even those jobs will be ...
I'm a big of learning from data. There are many things we can learn about swine flu and other kinds of flu by using public databases. In digital biology activity 1, we learned about the kinds of creatures that can get flu. Personally, I'm a little skeptical about the blowfly ...
If you have a little time, the Dolan DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor will be presenting some really interesting workshops on neuroscience and genetics. The dates are: Nov. 5, 2009: Inside Cancer - workshop on teaching cancer; Raritan Valley Community College, Somerville, NJ Nov. 6, 2009: Genes To ...
If you've read any of the many stories lately about Craig Venter or Jim Watson's genome, you've probably seen a "SNP" appear somewhere. You may be wondering, and rightly so: just what is a SNP? Never fear, hopefully this post will answer some of those questions. SNP stands for Single ...
In simple Mendelian genetics, a single change in one gene can produce a large change in mortality. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) will be funding genomics studies on Mendelian traits using a similar strategy. NHGRI will fund a small number of centers, dominant centers you might say, and ...
What's the connection? ( image from Newton TAB blog) I have to admit, I don't know. But, I do know where you can find out. Dr. Gerard Cangelosi, from the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, will be speaking about tuberculosis, godzilla, and XDR-TB, Monday night, 7 pm at the Pub at ...
Goodbye desktop, we're off to see the web. Both my students and I have been challenged this semester by the diversity of computer platforms, software versions, and unexpected bugs. Naturally, I turned to the world and my readers for help and suggestions. Some readers have suggested we could solve everything ...
Why the ABRF of course! I spend a fair amount time every summer giving workshops for college and high-school teachers on genomics and bioinformatics. One of the things that always surprises them, is the amount of lab work that's carried out by people working in shared, or core lab facilities ...
Charles Darwin was so fascinated by beetles he paid people to help him build his collection. The Coleopterists Society and the Smithsonian Institute want to help kids explore the wonders of beetles, too. They're providing grants for kids, in grades 7-12 to work on beetle biology. Applications are due by ...
Science Blogs has asked: What makes a good science teacher? Many of the science teachers that I've met can't really be described by the adjective "good." The better fitting words are: great, marvelous, inspiring, and fantastic. But, SBer's want to know, " what makes them so great?" Right? I've compiled ...
The first lab mouse I touched had soft white fur and a light pink tail. It looked cute enough to snuggle and take home as a pet and I was smitten. I slipped my hand into the cage, thinking the mouse would respond like my pet gerbils or my brother's ...
Genome sequences from California and Texas isolates of the H1N1 swine flu are already available for exploration at the NCBI. Let's do a bit of digital biology and see what we can learn. Activity 1. What kinds of animals get the flu? For the past few years we've been worrying ...
We often hear talk these days about failure in leadership and gutless congress people. I understand wanting to keep out of the fray. Last year, I wrote about a reasonable proposal to help young people and unwittingly tapped into a strain of people out there with an amazing amount of ...
Why is an eye, an eye and a nose, a nose? Why do different cells create different kinds of tissues when all the cells in a single organism start out with the same set of instructions (aka DNA)? Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes is a learning activity that helps students ...
HealthMap is a great site that could be an excellent resource when teaching a biology, microbiology, or health class. Not to mention, I can picture people using it before they travel somewhere or even just for fun. I learned about HealthMap awhile ago from Mike the Mad Biologist, but I ...
Why should professional scientists have all the fun? Researchers have been engineering glowing cats, and selling glowing fish at pet stores. High school kids can do genetic engineering too, if they have the right equipment. And you can help them get the equipment by contributing to our DonorsChoose fund drive ...
The University of Virginia does. They survey students every year to find out what they're up to tech-wise. Apparently 99% of their first year students own computers. And, a large majority of those computers are laptops (3058/3113 or 98%). And, what's on those laptops? Let's have a drum roll: 60% ...
Cofactor Genomics is offering to sequence a genome for a few classes for free using Next Generation DNA Sequencing technology (either Illumina GA or via AB SOLiD). Quoting from their site: Cofactor will ask course organizers for a 1 page description of how their ~700Mb sequencing project could be used ...
If you're a high school or college student with an interest in biomedical sciences, or healthcare careers, the NIH has set up an electronic mentoring program to help you find a guide. The mentoring happens via email and students must be 16 yrs or older. The site claims the mentors ...
