grading continues

[sciatrix]

...but at least I'm just doing the extra choice question now, in which students propose a future lab experiment they'd like to do over the course of the (~twelve-week) lab. They're supposed to explain what model system they want to use, the learning objectives the lab would accomplish, and the experimental idea itself.

Here are some of the more entertaining suggestions, organized by category:

Wildly Ambitious And Totally Impractical:
-"we could do an addiction genetics experiment locating a gene implicated in alcohol addiction in mice, including exposing mice to steady alcohol and measuring withdrawal levels!"
-"we could look at epigenetics in fruit flies by exposing successive generations to limited nutrients and seeing how this changes methylomes!"
-"what if we [made up the concept of ChIP-SEQ] and did that on human DNA"
-let's look at gene by environment interactions in zebrafish embryos!
-let's make our own GMO crops in the lab!
-let's genetically modify a line of human T cells that will then express a specific antigen receptor, using viral vectors to modify the cells and then testing them on a cancer line! (bless this student, who ended their answer with "you would need loads of money to pull this off and probably the entire semester for students to make it work, and also waivers for working with viruses--but it would be so cool!!!")
-can we make a hybrid fruit like a tangelo and breed plants for desired traits?
-what if we MADE HUMAN CANCER by targeting p53 and transgenically destroying it in human cell tissue?

Could We Genotype Ourselves More?*
-what if we tested everyone in the lab for a locus controlling how cilantro tastes
-what if we did ancestry testing on ourselves like in 23 and Me
-what if we all checked to see if we were pre-disposed to a disease
-what if we did a forensic hair analysis and then extracted DNA and tested the genes from our hair?
-what if we sampled our skin's microbiome and sequenced it? or our mouths? or other parts of ourselves?
-what if we typed our own blood?
-what if we sequenced everyone and made a phylogenetic tree of the whole class?
-what if we did the same thing but we extracted proteins from our own blood instead?
-what if we tested the whole class for Huntington's?

Entertaining Suggestions
-"what if we repeated the fly lab to study Mendelian assortment but using guinea pigs or mice instead? Then we could pet them."
-"what if instead of using fly eye color we looked at mutations like EXTRA EYES OR MOUTHS"
-"what if we tested to see if vegan/vegetarian products are actually meatless?"
-"use a less-annoying novel organism for inheritance patterns"
-"what if we extracted DNA from all of our pets and did a cladogram of them"
-"could we create illustrations using streaking of bacterial with plasmids incorporating fluorescent proteins onto plates? we could use strains with different colors!"
-"what if we did a species ID lab with fruits so we didn't have to smell the fish smell?"
-"what if everyone genotyped their dogs and then brought in the dogs so we could pet them as we reviewed the results? I like petting dogs."

Actual Potentially Workable Ideas
-"Could we try using CRISPR/CAS in bacteria? It's an important technique, and I think that it would be good for us to understand how it works."
-"What if we cultured the bacteria living on our hands or our cell phones and then did a metabarcoding study on the colonies we isolated?" (probably a little too ambitious, but could be workable)
-"What if we did a mouse experiment where we collect the DNA from different tissues?" I'm going to guess that my students are not going to be proficient enough to play with RNA transcriptomics, but this would definitely be a fun project if I trusted them not to contaminate the RNA.
-"What if we did a study with C. elegans involving checking the motility of two different genotypic lines to show how behaviors can be underlaid by genetic variation?"
-"What if we tested the accuracy of various types of PCR on a human sample?"
-"Could we look at RNAi, maybe in C. elegans?"

_{*We already do two separate labs involving extracting and isolating students' own DNA, including a modified VNTR/DNA fingerprinting lab and a population genetics lab involving a neutral locus. These tend to be very popular with students when they work, although the fingerprinting lab, which requires students to estimate their allele frequencies in the context of ethnicity, can be a nightmare for us when students don't enter their own data (and we have to put something in on ethnicity) or when students are mixed-race and quite reasonably think that categorizing themselves is kind of dumb. I had one student a few years ago who pointed out that he could easily categorize himself as African, Asian, or European all at once, and what the hell should he put down?}

Comments

[sylvaine]

"then we could pet them!" Oh, I think that's my favourite one xD

[sciatrix]

I loved that I got it twice.