Are you an educator interested in teaching your students about 'omics analysis? Then check out GeneLab's Educator Resources for both the high school and undergraduate level. GeneLab has created educational resources that are publicly available to help drive research and invite educators along with their students at various skill levels to perform analysis using real 'omics datasets. Open science enables accessibility to an audience that might otherwise not have their own methods of data acquisition through wet labs or experimentation yet have talents or interests in the field. The educational programs provided by GeneLab include the GeneLab for High Schools Internship (GL4HS) and the GeneLab for Colleges and Universities (GL4U).
GeneLab for High Schools
GL4HS is a summer intensive internship for high school students selected from an applicant pool of rising juniors or seniors. The program provides an introduction to space biology and methods associated with bioinformatics analysis. Students run GeneLab’s standardized RNAseq pipeline using an analysis platform to analyze a dataset, and the final product of the program is a team presentation on an -omics research proposal based on the teams’ findings. In tandem with the high school students, high school teachers are also selected to participate concurrently in the summer internship program. Teacher participants use the knowledge that is gained from this program to customize a lesson or unit for their own classroom use. You too can teach the content created by the teacher participants by accessing the materials published in the educator resources section. The educator resources page represents a full sequence of lessons and supporting activities that are designed to last approximately 1-2 weeks. Curricular Units will include a statement of content objectives, suggested pacing, methods, and accommodations to scale the lesson up or down to different age groups and ability levels, in addition to both teacher guide and student version of materials.
GeneLab for Colleges and Universities
GL4U is designed by NASA GeneLab in collaboration with the GeneLab Educational Working Group (EWG) to provide space biology-relevant training in bioinformatics to the next generation of scientists through direct and indirect approaches. The direct approach trains college-level students, and the indirect approach trains college educators, for each type of 'omics data hosted on the GeneLab Data Repository. During the bootcamps, participants learn about space biology, experimental design, data generation and associated technology usage, and perform hands-on analysis of space-relevant 'omics data using GeneLab's standard processing pipelines. During the indirect bootcamp, educators will receive materials and training to enable them to run the direct bootcamp at their home institutions or alternatively to adapt the content to implement within existing college courses, thereby extending the reach of this initiative to more students. The contents of previous bootcamps, including introductory command line and space biology-specific lectures, as well as hands-on instruction for processing RNAseq and AmpliconSeq data via Jupyter Notebooks (JNs), have been uploaded to the GeneLab Training GitHub Repository along with installation instructions.
