This summer's camp will occur once again at Olympic High School in the science labs.
We are grateful for our second year of funding from The Burroughs Wellcome Fund for Education Enhancement.


Activities: We will do some sample collecting on two field trips: we will collect leaves from American Chestnuts at Crowders Mt. State Park and from an orchard near Hendersonville. Using those samples, students will be introduced to some of the basic skills used in biotechnology labs, and learn what bioinformatics is and how it is used in biotechnology.

Skills include grinding up a sample and extracting the part of it you want (DNA) which requires micropipetting, making solutions, spectrophotometry, gel electrophoresis, and performing enzymatic reactions. Students will be given lots of opportunities to practice these skills while generating molecular DNA markers that help us tell American Chestnuts from other species used in breeding programs to create blight-resistant varieties.
For some of the students this is a first introduction to the tools of a modern molecular biology labs so lots of practice time is included. We will spend time becoming familiar with good practices and including controls in our experiments.

After our two collecting field trips students will also visit a research lab at UNC Charlotte to see how their DNA libraries are put into a sequencing instrument in Dr. Weller's UNC CHarlotte lab.

Other topics:

• Jobs using biotechnology/bioinformatics skills and what types of higher education program students prepared students for those careers.
• Many ethical concerns come up when carrying out biotechnology research - we will discuss a number of scenarios and what types of legal rules are in place.

By the end of the course students will be able to correctly follow the directions in a lab protocol (a kind of detailed recipe) that yields purified DNA, determine how much DNA they have and how pure it is, perform PCR (a type of molecular biology assay)using that DNA and interpret the results. Students will be able to present the methods and experiments to an audience.

Since our study organism is the American Chestnut students will also learn about the historical place of the American chestnut tree in the North Carolina biosphere and how its loss due to the blight has changed the forest environment, local economies, and communities.

This camp provides hands-on experience collecting samples and then using wet-lab and computational methods current in biological research; there will be short lectures, lots of discussions, and various Web material that puts the lab experience in context. Our goal is that students will be empowered to pursue experiments of their own.

To learn more, come ask us questions on Thursday, June 4th at 6:30pm in room 240 at Olympic High School.

• June 15^th to Crowder's Mountain to collect samples.
• June 19^th to 72 Will Hill Road, Hendersonville, NC, via US 74 West, I-26 West, and US 64 East - this is near Asheville, and is about 2 hours from Olympic HS. We will help inoculate young trees with fungal spores, and return in the fall to score them for resistance.
• June 26^th to the Bioinformatics Building on the UNC Charlotte campus, to visit Dr. Weller's research lab.