Many students in HPA's Independent Science Research (ISR) are motivated strictly by the temptation of discovery, so they can't resist doing research in their future fields of study, but the story is a little different for HPA senior Tanner Riley. Tanner has already taken an opportunity to conduct research with his summer internship at a biological research center, but now he wants to focus his ISR on helping others through what he has learned from the experience.
Tanner recently was an intern at the Coastal Marine Biolab, working under professionals using advanced biology techniques to genetically engineer the DNA of fetal chickens. These exact lab methods, like gel electrophoresis and PCR, ended up being the focus of a few lab experiments in his AP Biology class this year, and his experience with those enabled him to help the biology students through the really technical parts of their labs.
Tanner now wants to turn his project into a service learning experience. Next semester he is going to visit HPA's middle school to teach middle school students the concepts of DNA, genes, phenotypes and the processes scientists use to study all of them. He will base the lesson around an example that students can experience easily in the classroom, tasting a chemical called PTC. Roughly half of given population will have the gene that enables them to taste this chemical, and Tanner wants to be able to sample a student's DNA and predict whether they can or not before giving them a sample to taste. This way he can teach his students about the concepts of Genes and DNA, and transition into their real world expressions through phenotypes and proteins.
Tanner one day wants to be a professor teaching neuroscience to college students. He notes that his project "works as a really good parallel" for what he wants to do in the future. Presenting such complicated techniques and ideas to a group of middle schoolers does present a challenge: there are so many of them. Right now he has been working only a few sample at a time, preparing each one is a lengthy process on its own, but soon he'll have to apply everything he's practicing know to a much larger scale, about 20-30 samples, one for each student.
The process preparing samples for PCR, amplifying the DNA, and running the DNA through electrophoresis, all of which are time consuming, technical, and present many points of possible failure. Preparing the DNA from a spit sample involves using isolating the DNA from the other proteins and chemicals around the DNA, and then isolating the exact gene we want from the rest of the DNA. Amplifying the DNA, or making copies of it, involves running the DNA through a thermocycler with the appropriate RNA primers and TAC polymerase.