First-year students or trained phage hunters?
Transcript
Sally Molloy:
Just pick up the lid, and I just turn it a little bit, and drop it on.
This is our course, phage genomics. We’re in our fifth year of teaching this course, where the curriculum is from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Jillian Doyle:
In September, when we got here, we collected soil samples, and then we went through the process of enrichment, which resulted in a phage, which we worked on for the rest of the semester.
Tessa Lilley:
A phage is a virus that infect bacteria. It’s very diverse, so it’s a good building block for all the future research.
Sally Molloy:
The phage works as a teaching tool because it is considered probably the most numerous biological entity on Earth, so, back of the envelop math, people predict that there’s about 10^30 total bacteria in the world. For every bacterium, there’s at least 10 phage that can infect it.
Keith Hutchison:
As a system to work with, as a teaching tool it’s very simple, it’s very cost effective, it’s very fast for them to work with, and yet it teaches them the entire skill sets that they need to work with any other biological system. They will be using the same tools if they were ever to analyze the human genome, or some other more complex organism.
Jillian Doyle:
We were thrown into the course with very little previous knowledge. There wasn’t much hand holding, so we just, on our own, with our groups, and it developed really strong problem solving skills for us.
Sally Molloy:
It’s just infinite, the amount of discovery that is available to them, because every phage that they isolate is going to be different than any other phage that was isolated before, so they have the opportunity to ask a novel question, a real scientific question. When students are asking their own questions, and then we can say, “You know what? We can answer that. Let’s go into the lab and see if we can answer that question, “that’s just amazing.
Tessa Lilley:
We had spent months working with this virus. Obviously, we can’t see it with our naked eye, so it was just amazing to be able to see it, and we both sent a picture of it to our parents. They were so excited about it.
Jillian Doyle:
My parents had no idea what it was, but they could tell I was so proud of it. It’s only strengthened my love for microbiology. I know this is the path that I wanted to be on.
Keith Hutchison:
You see at some point the transition from being a memorizer, being a student who’s not sure why they’re there, not sure how to function, to all of a sudden somebody who’s nearly a colleague. When you start being able to talk to students as if they are your colleagues, that’s really, really exciting.