Microarray workshop for undergraduate faculty: Rocket science or basic science?
A grant has been awarded to Dr. Laura Hoopes at Pomona College to conduct a faculty workshop in summer, 2003 on use of microarrays for undergraduate teaching and research projects. In the workshop at the Institute for Systems Biology this summer, 11 faculty from a variety of institutions (small and large private, small and large public, predominantly underrepresented) will discuss issues, test methods, and make plans for a proposal for an open workshop in 2004 on applications for this state of the art method in global gene expression analysis in teaching/learning for undergraduates.
The faculty for the 2003 workshop include the PI and coPIs for this grant, the PI for a different NSF microarray outreach grant at Univ Alabama, Birmingham, users of the wet laboratory procedures from GCAT, experts in software and statistical analysis of microarrays, and a curriculum expert. The participants will include faculty from large and small public and private institutions, including at least one institution serving mainly students underrepresented in science. The workshop members will discuss the plans for a second summer in which an open workshop would be presented at Georgetown University with the support of TIGR, and begin the preparation of a proposal for that workshop. The issues for special attention will include the scope of the audience for usese of these methods with undergraduates and for the second workshop, the financial aspects of adopting our methods, the level and intensity of curricular change necessary to incorporate this methodology successfully, and the logistics and methods best used in the wet laboratory and the data analysis. In addition, the workshop will test three different approaches to labeling total RNA of yeast on actual microarrays, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches for use with students.
The most important outcome of broader significance from this workshop will be a new proposal to NSF to support an open workshop on using wet and dry microarray laboratories with undergraduate students, to meet the demand for such an event that we encountered at national meetings when presenting the results of Genome Consortium for Active Teaching's uses of microarrays in courses and student research. The second output will be a discussion of the scope, financial, and curriculum/logistic implications of using microarrays with undergraduates to be placed on the GCAT web site for public access, and presented by GCAT members at national meetings of the American Society for Microbiology and the American Society for Cell Biology, as well as the online educational journal of the ASCB. The third output will be a revised set of protocols for the three different labeling methods and the tested dry laboratory software/data sets, with commentary from the workshop participants on their good and bad points, for the GCAT web site and the open workshop laboratory manual. The fourth outcome will be preparation of 10 faculty members (the 11th person is an outside advisor, so we would not expect him to participate in our open workshop) to lead the workshop proposed for 2004, and be prepared to lead future workshops.
