This summer's camp will occur once again at Olympic High School in the science labs.
We are grateful for our third and final 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 to prepare samples so we can sequence their DNA, and how to use bioinformatics methods to create meaining from the data generated.

Skills include grinding up a sample and extracting the part of it you want (chloroplast DNA for our project) 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 chloroplast DNA amplicons that we will sequence to produce the complete genome of the American chestnut trees in our study.

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 and DNA sample purification, students will also spend 2 days at a research lab at UNC Charlotte to prepare the samples for sequencing and use the Illumina MySeq instrument for their project - at Dr. Weller's UNC Charlotte lab.

Other topics:

• Jobs using biotechnology/bioinformatics skills and what types of higher education program students prepare 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 ppolicies, regulations and laws are in place to protect the public.

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, prepare the DNA for sequencing and make sure it is of high quality, carry out the sequencing reactions, and know the steps needed to 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.

• June 16^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 17^th to Crowder's Mountain State Park.
• June 23-24^th to the Bioinformatics Building on the UNC Charlotte campus, to work in Dr. Weller's research lab.