Outreach Update

The Biotech Project

Early morning sunlight stripes the students in Margaret Wilch’s honors biology class at Tucson High School. These sophomores are a quiet, sleepy group as Wilch recaps lessons from last week’s class in preparation for today’s session. “We’re going to make copies of DNA, just like your cells do. Now, what kinds of things do your cells do to replicate DNA naturally?” As the students struggle to recall information presented in another early morning session, Wilch coaxes them to reconstruct the process of cell replication for today’s laboratory investigation: examining a single gene using PCR. PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, is a technique that will amplify (create multiple copies of) a small piece of DNA.

Biotechnology. The term is ubiquitous in Arizona today. The University of Arizona’s BIO5 (formerly the Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology) and the Translational Genomics Research Institute are merely two of the most visible players in a statewide bonanza of biologically-oriented research operations. Their prominence points to the increasing importance of the life sciences in general, and of biotechnology in particular. And all of this is keeping Dr. Nadja Anderson rather busy.

Anderson is the director of the BIOTECH Project, and the occasional classroom partner of teachers like Wilch.  In providing equipment, supplies, and expertise for a number of experimental activities, Anderson assists middle and high school biology teachers throughout Arizona in engaging their students in investigations of fundamental scientific concepts such as genetic engineering, identifying genetic mutations, and disease detection and prevention.

Begun in 1996 by the UA’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology with funding from the Flinn Foundation, the Project helps teachers bring biotechnology techniques into the classroom.  Anderson is the Project’s third director, a post she assumed in 2002. After an extensive education in the field of chemistry (an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a master’s degree from Northern Arizona University), she decided that her real scientific interests lay in biology. That decision lead her to a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Arizona, a degree she completed in 1999. After teaching in a variety of settings, she determined that science education in an application like the BIOTECH Project was her “perfect” job, one that she has been happily working at for the past two years.

Among the activities that are made available to Arizona classrooms through the BIOTECH Project are DNA extraction and examination, the examination of genetic differences, the manipulation of DNA and genetic engineering, DNA fingerprinting, and disease detection and prevention. PCR, the technique being utilized in Margaret Wilch’s class, is in this case being used from extracted yeast DNA.

Wilch succeeds, through gentle but relentless probing, in engaging the class with the question, “What kinds of things do we need to have to replicate DNA?”. She eventually gets the answers she is looking for: nucleotides, DNA polymerase, and template DNA.  Once the process has been outlined, the students break out into groups of five or six around worktables where the PCR will be performed. Now it is Anderson’s turn to get the students involved. 

PCR requires very small volumes that must be precisely measured.  Anderson teaches the class how to measure small volumes accurately.  Each group adds all of the components necessary for the reaction to the PCR tubes:  DNA from the yeast, nucleotides, buffer, polymerase, and primers specific to the gene that the students wish to copy.

The gene is called rad14, which in yeast is the blueprint for an enzyme involved in the repair of DNA. The students have been making observations on two strains of yeast, one of which had decreased viability after exposure to UV light. The students hypothesized that this sensitivity might be due to a mutation in the yeast. The PCR technique will be utilized to determine if the DNA repair gene is different (a mutant) compared to the normal (wild-type) yeast.

Each group sets up their two reactions and places the tubes into a thermal cycler, which will cycle between the temperature to denature (the process of breaking the hydrogen bonds between the double stranded DNA), the temperature at which the primers will find (anneal) the specific sequences at the beginning and end of the gene, and the ideal temperature for the polymerase to add nucleotides to the primers, thus synthesizing two strands of DNA from one. This cycle will continue 30 times,  amplifying over 1 billion DNA strands. 

As Anderson runs the cycles, the students drift back from their workstations to their desks, chatting about music, movies, and the desiderata of teenage life. But three of them linger around the thermal cycler, asking questions, or just watching the process. Heads nod in understanding as Anderson describes what’s happening in more detail, filling in the gaps in the students’ grasp of the experiment. Only three out of a class of thirty, but if their interest leads them to an ongoing relationship with the biotechnological world, it’s not a bad haul for a morning’s work.  Not bad at all.