Are you involved in citizen science?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Sandra Porter on August 6, 2010 at 7:56pm

Names of the organizations collaborating on the project: Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (Jeanne Chowning, Dina Kovarik, Joan Griswold), Digital World Biology (Sandra Porter), EdLab Group (Karen Peterson), Seattle Aquarium (Shawn Larson)

Project name: Bio-ITEST

Description: Bio-ITEST is an NSF ITEST project (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and teachers). The goal of the project is to develop and adapt curriculum to help high school teachers use bioinformatics in their classes. DNA barcoding is a research activity that will be carried out by teachers who use the more advanced curriculum.

Number and age range of citizen scientists: Our citizen scientists are high school students. We are currently in the middle of our first workshop with 25 teachers (Aug 1- 13th). Each teacher has a class of about 30 students so - I guess this could be up to 750 students. However, some of our teachers are just starting programs and might be doing the lab portion of bar coding until later years.

We have made something that might be helpful to the community as an introduction. I gathered trace files from the NCBI for example organisms and posted them along with a short tutorial on trimming the sequences, selecting high quality regions, assembling the sequences, and identifying the species or genus with BLAST. You can find the DNA barcoding tutorial here: http://digitalworldbiology.com/dwb/Tutorials/Tutorials.html

I wish one of us could have attended the meeting in Ventura. Unfortunately, the Aug 1-3rd time was the same time as our workshop.

Permalink Reply by Karen James on August 6, 2010 at 8:18pm

Thanks, Sandra, this is just the sort of reply we were hoping for. This sort of indirect engagement (scientists train teachers, who then engage their students) is one of the main categories of activity we identified; the other is direct engagement (scientists collaborating directly with students). Are your teachers/students contributing reference sequences to BOLD or are they using BOLD as an identification engine?

Permalink Reply by Sandra Porter on August 6, 2010 at 8:29pm

Hi Karen,

Ideally, our teachers/students will be able to contribute to BOLD as well as using it for identification.

It may be awhile however, before we get to that point. We're probably going to have to work on debugging our wet lab procedure a bit to make sure we get sequences to submit.

We ran the gels from the PCR reaction today and we only saw one band (faint) in one sample. Next week, Seattle Biomedical will doing the sequencing for us, so we're crossing our fingers and hoping that there's DNA to sequence even if we didn't see it in the gels.