Workshop overview for the Data Carpentry genomics curriculum. Data Carpentry’s aim is to teach researchers basic concepts, skills, and tools for working with data so that they can get more done in less time, and with less pain. This workshop teaches data management and analysis for genomics research including: best practices for organization of bioinformatics projects and data, use of command-line utilities, use of command-line tools to analyze sequence quality and perform variant calling, and connecting to and using cloud computing. This workshop is designed to be taught over two full days of instruction. Please note that workshop materials for working with Genomics data in R are in “alpha” development. These lessons are available for review and for informal teaching experiences, but are not yet part of The Carpentries’ official lesson offerings. Interested in teaching these materials? We have an onboarding video and accompanying slides available to prepare Instructors to teach these lessons. After watching this video, please contact team@carpentries.org so that we can record your status as an onboarded Instructor. Instructors who have completed onboarding will be given priority status for teaching at centrally-organized Data Carpentry Genomics workshops.

This article is designed to help students and teachers think about the nature of various determinants underlying biological variation. Teachers facilitating any selection investigation will find this background information helpful, including those planning for the AP Biology Lab 1 of Big Idea 1: Evolution, Artificial Selection. Learners at secondary or tertiary grade levels who are preparing to investigate variation or are working on interpreting variation data can also use this resource.

In this 5 lesson set, students learn about the foraging behavior of bees and hypothesize if the bee’s behavior is related to its ability to detect sugar. Students will then determine which type of foraging bee would be best for pollination or honey production. Students will learn about the process of gel electrophoresis as a genetic tool and analyze DNA to identify strains of bees who are better pollen-collecting bees or better nectar-collecting bees.

The Greenomes site is part of a laboratory- and Internet-based curriculum to bring college students up to the minute with modern plant research. Plant molecular genetic and genomic research still lags behind medically-oriented research on microbes and higher animals. As a result, there are relatively few lab experiences that expose college-level students to the growing insights into plants offered by genomic biology.

This blog post, written by the MiniPCR Team, describes the use of biotechnology kits and equipment (available from multiple suppliers) in the classroom to help students and learners understand the connection between observable phenotypic traits and underlying genotypes. These investigations can be approached at varying complexity, incorporating plant breeding and growing plants through their whole life cycle, depending on teaching goals. This post includes links to the necessary seeds and options for biotechnology equipment/materials to accomplish these investigations.

Help Me Understand Genetics presents basic information about genetics in clear language and provides links to online resources.

Students randomly select jelly beans (or other candy) that represent genes for several human traits such as tongue-rolling ability and eye color. Then, working in pairs (preferably of mixed gender), students randomly choose new pairs of jelly beans from those corresponding to their own genotypes. The new pairs are placed on toothpicks to represent the chromosomes of the couple's offspring. Finally, students compare genotypes and phenotypes of parents and offspring for all the "couples" in the class. In particular, they look to see if there are cases where parents and offspring share the exact same genotype and/or phenotype, and consider how the results would differ if they repeated the simulation using more than four traits.

An online lesson for students to learn about transcription and translation that includes online resources and online interactable activities.

How can we Design Cattle to Better Meet Human Needs?

In this high school Storyline unit on genetics and heredity, students are introduced to ‘SuperCows’. As they explore the vast variety of cattle breeds, students discover that cattle are specialized for different purposes and while similar, the ‘SuperCows’ are clearly unique. Students wonder what caused this diversity and specificity which leads to investigations about the role of inheritance, DNA and proteins.

Instructional video on how DNA binding proteins recognize their target sequences in DNA.

Although textbooks describe this process and show illustrations, it is difficult to grasp without seeing a live demonstration.

Created for Biology 41 General Genetics at Tufts University.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Chloroplasts harness sunlight to power all the processes that help plants grow. Like engines, they must carefully balance their fuel to run efficiently. In plants, that’s the ratio of ATP to NADPH, two forms of fuel produced by photosynthesis. But scientists have long known that ATP/NADPH ratios in chloroplasts fall short of the value required for plants to turn CO₂ into sugars. To find out how plants overcome this imbalance, researchers tracked ATP in Arabidopsis plants in real time using a fluorescent protein sensor. They found that immature chloroplasts in young seedlings imported cytosolic ATP for chloroplast biogenesis, using an abundance of ATP transporter proteins to do the job, but mature chloroplasts downregulated these transporters to minimize ATP importation. Instead of importing ATP to maintain fuel balance, chloroplasts exported NADPH in the form of malate..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

The Genetics Student Edition book is one of ten volumes making up the Human Biology curriculum, an interdisciplinary and inquiry-based approach to the study of life science.

In this video segment adapted from NOVA: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, learn how modern genetics and molecular biology offer compelling support for evolution. The video features an interview with biologist Ken Miller.

Final video in a series from 23andMe and Khan Academy that introduces human prehistory, this video describes how when people started crossing oceans, genetic and cultural differences between people from different continents began fading.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The brain is the most complex biological structure known. All thoughts, movements, and behaviors are coordinated in this control center, where information is processed and transmitted in the form of electrical impulses and chemical signals. It perhaps comes as no surprise then, that alterations in this function can lead to neurological and psychiatric disorders. Now, a new study has pinpointed specific regions of a gene expressed in brain cells that appear to be associated with conditions such as developmental delay and intellectual disability. Neurodevelopmental disorders present early in life and are caused by impairments of growth, development, and function of the brain and central nervous system. With conditions including autism, attention deficit disorder, and schizophrenia, these disorders are characterized by deficits in cognitive, social, or personal functioning..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Most genetic studies of Alzheimer’s disease compare patient DNA to controls to identify mutations that increase disease risk. That approach has identified some risk variants, but none have led to effective treatments, and most of the genetic contributors are still unknown. Now, a team of researchers is tackling the problem from the opposite side, asking why some high-risk elderly people don’t have Alzheimer’s – a strategy that has discovered a protective mutation in a gene that may be a good drug target. To find protective mutations for Alzheimer’s, the scientists first searched the Utah Population Database for families with above-average rates of Alzheimer's that also had at least four people who were resilient to the disease -- that is, they were cognitively normal, despite being 75 years old or older, and having the APOE e4 allele, which increases risk more than 5-fold per copy..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Students are introduced to the latest imaging methods used to visualize molecular structures and the method of electrophoresis that is used to identify and compare genetic code (DNA). Students should already have basic knowledge of genetics, DNA (DNA structure, nucleotide bases), proteins and enzymes. The lesson begins with a discussion to motivate the need for imaging techniques and DNA analysis, which prepares students to participate in the associated two-part activity: 1) students each choose an imaging method to research (from a provided list of molecular imaging methods), 2) they research basic information about electrophoresis.

Using an amino acid translation table to understand the impact of point and frameshift mutations.

This blog post, written by Frieda Reichsman, discusses how educators can implement three-dimensional teaching methods into classrooms and meet the Next Generation Science Standards. The article introduces the 3D Teacher Moves Table, a lesson-planning tool created by Hedi Lauffer at Wisconsin Fast Plants, as a guide for high school biology teachers to use when developing lessons and curricula to support students' data analysis skills. Additionally, this article introduces a lesson investigation using Fast Plants and data analysis, where educators can implement the 3D Teacher Moves Table. The Biological Variation in Fast Plants Lesson Plan can be available to view separately.

Students will begin the lesson by matching pictures of animal parents and offspring, then the teacher will allow students to describe how they were able to create matches. Next, the teacher will create a T-chart and allow students to share how dogs are similar in appearance in some ways but can also have different characteristics. Lastly, the students will create an illustration of a new animal using a "Trait Table" that includes characteristics of both parent animals. At the conclusion of the lesson, the students should be able to identify similarities and differences between offspring and their parents and other members of the same species. This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.