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To stimulate an interest in science, children need to be exposed to real
scientific research in order to sense the excitement of discovery and gain
a feel for what the scientific method truly means. Because of the
increasing importance of molecular biology in our daily lives, it would
also be desirable to expose them to modern molecular biological methods.
Finally, in order to be widely disseminated, any program should involve
reasonably inexpensive materials. The overall objective of this Phase I
proposal is to develop a method to involve school-age children in real
scientific research in order to enhance and motivate their educational
science curriculum. Consequently, we have designed the experiments
described herein to be both illustrative of basic biological ideas and at
the same time possible (and safe) to perform in the context of the sixth
and ninth grade classrooms. In brief, the experiments are designed to
generate and characterize yeast mutants in a poorly-understood but
important large membrane-bound proton-pumping enzyme termed the vacuolar
ATPase (V-ATPase). This enzyme is responsible for producing the acidic
conditions found in the lumen of such structures as the yeast vacuole, and
organelles in higher cells such as the lysosome and the neurosecretory
vesicle. Teachers will first be trained over the summer in basic cell
biology and the methods used in the experiments. Teachers will then have
their students perform these experiments in the classroom. Students will
isolate the (plasmid-borne) gene from each mutant after proving phenotype
and send it to the P.I.'s laboratory for sequence determination. All
sequences will be shared with the students. Students will be asked to
predict the consequences of the mutations on the secondary, tertiary, and
quaternary structure of the enzyme (based on a plausible crystal structure
modeled after the known F1FO ATPase structure) and to develop hypotheses
regarding other residues that might compensate for, or exacerbate, the
initial changes. At the discretion of the P.I., certain of these
hypotheses will then be tested by a subsequent group of students. Because
teaching a subject has the effects of solidifying what has been learned,
another important aspect of this project will be the involvement of
secondary or middle school children to serve as mentors for elementary
school children, both in face-to-face learning situations and via the
Internet. To share the sequence and assay data, to insure that data
collection is occurring in the proper manner, and to provide expert
experimental help for both students and teachers, an existing Web site (or
e-mail, FAX, and/or telephone) will be used to link the schoolchildren's
classroom and the laboratory of a scientist (the P.I.) interested and
involved in understanding V-ATPase structure and function. We anticipate
that dissemination of this program (or similar programs focused on other
genes) will be reasonably straightforward. Teachers and students will both
gain a strong appreciation of how science really works and we will collect
fundamentally interesting mutants in the V-ATPase. This project is supported by grant R25 RR12357, from the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) Program, National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health, DHHS. |
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