Brooklyn College Named Associate Member of National Science Education Alliance
12/18/2009
Brooklyn College has been selected as one of four U.S. colleges to be named as associate members of the Science Education Alliance, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute said today.
The news that Brooklyn College, along with Queensborough Community College, the College of Charleston (South Carolina) and the University of California–Davis, had been selected came as part of a larger announcement that Chevy Chase, Md.–based HHMI had chosen a dozen universities and colleges as full members, joining 24 other institutions are already participating in a national experiment aimed at changing the future of undergraduate science education.
“Brooklyn College is honored to become an associate member of the Science Education Alliance and is grateful to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for this opportunity,” says Provost William Tramontano. “The transformation of science education at the national level will only occur with a strong collaborative relationship between scientists and educators.”
The Science Education Alliance was created by HHMI in 2007 as a resource for science educators. Participating faculty work together to deliver innovative science education programs and bring the excitement of doing research directly to students in a novel and collaborative way.
HHMI has committed $4 million over four years to the alliance’s first program—the National Genomics Research Initiative. The initiative is a two-part yearlong course that offers students the opportunity to make real discoveries by doing research on bacterial viruses, called bacteriophages, or more commonly “phages.”
Phages are estimated to be the most widely distributed and diverse entities in the biosphere. These ubiquitous viruses can be found in any reservoir populated by bacterial hosts, such as soil or the intestines of animals. They have been used for more than 60 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Participating schools generally offer the SEA course as a substitute for their introductory biology laboratory class. In the first term, students isolate phages from locally collected environmental samples. Given the diversity of these viruses, each one is almost certain to be unique, so students get to name their newly identified life form. They spend the rest of the term purifying and characterizing their phage and extracting its DNA.
Between terms, the purified DNA is sent to the Joint Genome Institute–Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it is sequenced. In the second term, students receive files containing their isolated phage’s DNA sequence. The students use bioinformatics tools to analyze and annotate the genomes from their phage.
As students at an SEA associate member college, Brooklyn College students will attend training sessions that will allow them to implement this research experience in laboratory classes on campus.
“Our program will be an abbreviated version of the full membership,” says Louise Hainline, dean of research and graduate studies. Hainline, who co-wrote the proposal with Assistant Professor of Biology Rafael Ovalle and Professor Peter Lipke, chairperson of the Biology Department, added that HHMI will “provide the lab manuals and other resources that they have developed for running the program, including the protocols for collecting and analyzing the phages.” They will also provide the key sequencing of the DNA to help students identify what they have found.
