NextGen Genome Solver

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Preparing students for 21st century employment in STEM fields is an important goal for all undergraduate science faculty. The principal investigators (PIs) will conduct a series of innovative portable workshops at selected sites around the country as a means of providing Biology faculty with tools and techniques proven to successfully engage students in research in two rapidly developing fields in biology, bioinformatics and microbial genomics. The research skills practiced at the workshops are accessible to all with a computer and an Internet connection, making participation in the project cost-effective for anyone even at severely resource-limited institutions. Bioinformatics studies facilitate student understanding of evolution, information flow, structure and function, and biological systems. Students exposed to the thinking necessary for tackling bioinformatics problems gain experience in computational analyses and modeling, both important to understanding how human beings and the world around them function and interact. This project is significant and important because it will enhance and expand a previous successful pilot effort to help biology faculty introduce more computational approaches into both introductory and advanced biology courses. A wide spectrum of institutions, ranging from community colleges to highly selective doctoral institutions, will act as hosts or participate in these workshops. This project will add to the research base on science education research about effective approaches to faculty enhancement in undergraduate biology education and an important concept in biology, horizontal gene transfer (HGT) as a driver of bacterial evolution. The PIs previously developed and implemented the Genome Solver Community of Practice, training faculty via face-to-face workshops conducted at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and developing an online forum for communication (http://genomesolver.org). The community developed through that project is exploring the rich DNA data sources emerging from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). The current project, called Genome Solver On-the-Go, will greatly expand the reach of the workshops while reducing costs of individual workshops and establish strong local nodes of expertise that can act as regional catalysts for disseminating the information and skills imparted by the workshops. New features that will be introduced in this phase of the project include engaging faculty and students in a multi-dimensional, community bioinformatics project. Faculty and their students will examine bacteria/phage pairs for evidence of HGT, then submit their data to a centralized curated database. The biological question in the HGT project is not one that can be easily approached by a small number of researchers; understanding the extent to which HGT occurs between bacteriophages and bacteria, and how this drives bacterial evolution, will require many individual contributions to the centralized dataset. This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/.