October 31, 2003

Students' green thumbs help scientists

By Kevin Miller
The Roanoke Times

Researchers at Virginia Tech are turning to an unlikely population for help in unlocking the plant world's genetic code: high school students.

Virginia Tech is the lead university on a $1.3 million federal project to farm out genetic research to high school science classes in Virginia and nationwide. Students will act as de facto lab technicians by designing and performing experiments meant to identify the purpose of individual genes in the arabidopsis plant, one of the most important plants to genetic researchers.

Erin Dolan, outreach coordinator for the Fralin Biotechnology Center at Tech and the project's lead investigator, said students and teachers frequently called her center for suggestions on unique lab projects. The Partnership for Research and Education in Plants, as the project is called, exposes students to cutting-edge science and assists researchers at the same time, Dolan said.

"The scientists are getting extra pairs of hands--many, many extra hands--and students are learning how to design an experiment," she said.

In 2000, scientists announced that they had successfully mapped the entire genome of a plant for the first time. But mapping the arabidopsis' DNA was only the first step in a process that researchers hope could lead to stronger, more disease-resistant plants and crops.

"Part of understanding the genome of a plant involves taking out its genes one by one," Dolan said. "The problem with that is this plant has 25,000 genes--almost as many genes as humans."

That's where the student-scientists will come in, she said.

Tech researchers begin by supplying the students with two sets of seeds from the arabidopsis, which is a member of the mustard family and is popular among researchers for its simplicity and growth cycle. One set of seeds is normal; the other lacks one or more specific genes.

Just like professional researchers, students then expose the two sets of plants to the same experimental environment - such as reduced light or water - and watch whether the genetically altered plant responds differently without its full set of genes. University researchers will then replicate any experiments that yield intriguing results.

About 20 Virginia high schools are participating in the PREP program this year. Beginning in 2005, Cornell University, the University of California at Davis, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Arizona are expected to join the program and begin working with high schools in their regions.

By the end of the five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, 40,000 students in 20 states could be participating in PREP annually, Dolan said.

John Kowalski's science class at Roanoke Valley Governor's School is already involved. Kowalski's class has been growing normal and mutant plants in soils deprived of various nutrients.

Ashton Sullivan, 16, a Governor's School student and a junior at Patrick Henry High School, said the project allows high school students to participate in original research and to gain a sense of what professional scientists do.

"I think it's a different kind of lab [class], much more hands-on," Sullivan said. "It's fun and not too hard, and we're learning how real biologists do research."

John McDowell, an assistant professor of molecular plant pathology at Tech and a longtime arabidopsis researcher, believes the partnerships with high schools could lead to significant discoveries. McDowell, who is an adviser on the project, said one high school class may have already produced results applicable to his work on mold and mildew.

"They may indeed stumble on something," McDowell said. "While the experiments they are doing are relatively simple from a technological standpoint, they are pretty similar to the way that scientists in university labs are going about characterizing these mutant plants."