Educational

Outreach

in the Vision lab

What is “educational outreach”?

Educational outreach...

• ...supports formal or classroom-based education

• ...supports informal education outside the classroom

• ...increases understanding and appreciation of science

• ...increases the involvement in science

Educational Outreach in our lab

1. Genomics Media Book

2. DESTINY Bus Module

Genomics MediaBook

• interactive multimedia environment that contains realistic 3D Flash animations, bioinformatics tools, video and audio files, and an electronic reference almanac

• can be a stand-alone content delivery system or a way to supplement science courses that cover genomic related materials.

• primary audiences: science instructors and students in upper division natural science courses with knowledge of genetics.

• collaboration of • Institute for Science Learning, UNC • Malcolm Campbell, Davidson College, NC• Center Line Productions, Raleigh, NC

Genomics MediaBook: 3 themes, 7 topics

pairwise sequence alignment,

multiple sequence alignment,

phylogenetic reconstruction

BLAST

genome annotation

...

Sequence Analysis topic: content

pairwise sequence alignment

EVOLUTION

• introduction

• global vs. local

• scoring matrices

• dynamic programming

• BLAST

phylogenetic reconstructionEVOLUTION,

DISEASE

• introduction

• anatomy of a phylogeny

• distance-based, character-based methods

• NJ example

• MP and ML (overview)

• bootstrap

multiple sequence alignmentEVOLUTION,

DISEASE

• introduction

• why DP won’t work

• progressive methods

• iterative methods

storyboard - example slide

storyboard - example slide

GMB beta

GMB: opportunities and challenges

• great opportunity to be involved in the development of a new kind of textbook!

• templates for different stages have yet to be worked out.

• animations are not a natural way of thinking about lecture material for us - yet.

• we have to write out the narration for the book.

DESTINY

PMABS (Partnership for Minority Advancement in the Biomolecular Sciences):

DESTINY promotes equity of access to quality science learning opportunities in order to increase interest, ensure understanding, and demonstrate the relevance of science to all students' lives.

Typical DESTINY module

1.Pre-lab (in class)activities to set up a story/question and to cover background necessary to carry out the wet-lab

2.Wet-lab (aboard DESTINY)discovery/answer: protein or gel electrophoresis

3.Post-lab (in class) discuss wet-lab, optional follow-up topics

The basis for our DESTINY module:

In 1905 Constantin Mereschkowsky was the first to argue that chloroplasts are (derived from) reduced cyanobacteria.

His errors (that students are going to find and correct)

• he missed the dichotomy of life into prokaryotes and eukaryotes; he inferred that life arose twice independently

• he did not recognize that mitochondria also are descendants of endosymbiotic bacteria

• he thought that the different colored plastids of different algal groups arose from different free-living cyanobacteria

Our DESTINY module

1. Pre-labstudents will learn about an “almost correct” hypothesis of endosymbiosis from 1905 and will come up with a strategy to test this hypothesis using 2004 tools

2. Computer-labstudents will do sequence alignment and phylogeny reconstruction of mitochondrial, chloroplast, nuclear, and bacterial sequences to confirm mitochondrial and plastid endosymbiosis

3. Post-labdiscuss wet-lab, optional follow-up topics

Our DESTINY module: pre-lab

Our DESTINY module: computer lab

Our DESTINY module: post-lab

some ideas:

• primary vs. secondary endosymbiosis

• organellar gene loss and gene transfer to the nucleus

• origin of the nucleus

• more on phylogenetic reconstruction

• …

DESTINY: opportunities and challenges

• DESTINY is great for high school kids who wouldn’t be able to use new technology otherwise

• this will be a module for high school students!