The emergence of antibiotics resistance is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today...
In order to educate high-school students around the world on the scope of the problem and the fascinating science behind it, we developed a unique outreach program that allows remote users to engage with evolution experiments online through a robotic platform situated at our lab in the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Participating classes will evolve dozens of bacterial strains on different antibiotics over multiple weeks. During this interactive experiment students will monitor, in real-time, how drug resistance gradually emerges over time. As the experiment unfolds, students will update the drug dosing regimen, on-the-fly, according to their daily observations. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying drug resistance we will sequence the DNA of specific genes known to be associated with drug resistance. In addition, we will sequence the entire genome of some of the evolved strains to identify de-novo mutations across the entire genome.
We aim to expose students to technological breakthroughs that are transforming research today and are completely inaccessible in the classroom...
The program aims to use interactive online technologies to bridge the "access" gap by allowing remote communities to actively participate in front-line scientific research while celebrating many of the core principles of academic research, as team work, open access and international collaboration. The first iteration of the our program is set to start on March 2018 with six high-school classes. Teachers and educators interested in participating in the program during 2019 should email Dr. Mitchell directly.
