Late last year, the Los Alamos arm of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute organized an outreach team dedicated to taking genome science activities to students in Northern New Mexico. This spring, the team created presentations about genome sequencing as well as hands-on activities for junior high and high school students. The team has conducted the educational program with students from several area high schools and, in coming weeks, will be working with additional area schools.
The team debuted their program on March 14 at the Laboratory’s Expanding Your Horizons Student Workshop at the University of New Mexico Los Alamos campus with an activity that taught young women how to extract DNA from strawberries using dish soap and other household ingredients.
The first school presentation was on March 20 with students from Pojoaque High School and the Victory Faith Christian Academy in Española. On April 17, the team will be presenting to Los Alamos classes. Interested reporters are welcome to attend a future presentation.
Each outreach presentation begins with a talk given by a genome sequencing expert. The talk is then followed by three hands-on activities for the students in DNA modeling, DNA extraction, and DNA sequencing and assembly. Students learn the fundamentals of genome science and about the work done at the JGI from the talk and exercises.
The team plans to expand the number of presentations and develop new demonstrations in coming months in order reach out to more schools and students and to help better educate the local communities about the kind and importance of research being conducted at the JGI facilities.
The JGI-LANL Outreach Team is composed of David Sims, Linda Meincke, Chris Munk, Lynne Goodwin, Cliff Han, Beverly Parson-Quintana, and Linda Sue Thompson from the Bioscience Division; and Karen Davenport, a science educator at the Bradbury Science Museum.
The Joint Genome Institute was created by DOE in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping, DNA sequencing, technology development, and information sciences pioneered at the DOE genome centers at Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos national laboratories.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and the Washington Division of URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.