2024 Articles

Abstract 2366 Glass Half Full or Empty: Illuminating the Human Transcriptome - Inspiring Underserved High School Students with an Experiential Biology Laboratory Research Experience

Nelson, Theodore; Zhang, Dennis; Sorid, Sophia; Chang, Timothy; Bajaj, Neil; Viola, Joseph; Heckelman, Lauren; Pollack, Robert

Introducing high school students to the research life cycle remains a challenge within education. Glass Half Full or Empty: Illuminating the Human Transcriptome is an eight-session course designed to introduce underserved high school students in New York City to wet-lab biochemistry and molecular biology techniques. The content introduces students to the underlying principles of the molecular DNA/RNA sequencing revolution and thereafter teaches students to verify novel RNA transcript variants predicted with long-read RNA-sequencing data.1 As such, students are contributing - one transcript at a time - to a more complete version of the human transcriptome. They become researchers working within a reproducible scientific tradition, recapitulating the results of their classmates across multiple independent replicates. The eight sessions consist of two lectures, two dry labs, three wet labs, and a final poster presentation session. The lectures gradually introduce the necessary theoretical content with an emphasis on visual learning, reducing barriers caused by a lack of introductory biology coursework. The first dry lab teaches students primer design, encouraging students to become familiar with the Benchling molecular biology suite. The three wet labs build student confidence in their technique, starting with a guided-polymerase chain reaction setup, followed by a semi-guided gel electrophoresis experiment, and finally progressing to an unguided gel extraction within an open-lab session. Throughout these sessions, we maintain an undergraduate mentor to high school student ratio of 2:1, recruiting from our local Columbia undergraduate community. Through this reciprocal relationship, these mentors acquire the skills to direct and instruct future iterations of the course, allowing the program to sustainably serve its target communities. As the culmination of their experience, students spend the final session producing and presenting a poster to a diverse audience of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Throughout the course's duration, students have reported high satisfaction with the course quality, and its purpose as a hands-on and unique opportunity to explore the research life cycle. Often, students report a newfound and/or renewed interest in biological research, making our work all the more rewarding. 1 Nelson, T.M.; Ghosh, S.; Postler, T.S. L-RAPiT: A Cloud-Based Computing Pipeline for the Analysis of Long-Read RNA Sequencing Data. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2022, 23, 15851. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms232415851

We thank the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Columbia University Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity, the Columbia University Double Discovery Center, the Stephens FamilyFoundation, and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for their financial support of this program.