Genomic Outreach for Minorities

We partner with the Genomics Outreach for Minorities (GenOM) program at University of Washington. The program offers summer research experience in genomics to talented undergraduate and high school minority students. Two students have been recruited through this program: Emma Noyes, a Native American (Colville) high school student and David Baker, a Native American (Cherokee) undergraduate student in Chemical Engineering.

Emma has worked in the lab during the summers of 2003 and 2004, and she has conducted research on her own in Omak, WA during the school year of 2003-2004, in close contact with the MO personnel in Seattle. She has carried out a variety of projects including isolation and characterization of novel methylotroph strains, isolation and analysis of environmental RNA, and stable isotope probing. Emma has co-authored three articles describing the results of these experiments. She has also presented posters describing her work at the GenOM conferences held at University of Washington in 2003 and 2004. Emma is now a sophomore in the department of Microbiology, University of Washington.

David has joined the MO group during the summer of 2005 and during the school year of 2005/2006. He has been involved in a series of novel approaches exploring the applicability of the newly emerging techniques to the goals of our MO, including whole genome amplification from specific populations of cells separated by flow-cytometry-based cell sorting, random reverse-transcriptase-PCR amplification and analysis of environmental rRNA, cell separation from complex communities using a redox dye, etc. David has co-authored one paper and he has also presented a poster describing his work at the Annual biomedical research conference for minority students in Atlanta, GA (2005)

Bioscience Experiment

The Bioscience experience: an introduction to basic science research for underrepresented minority students is part of the Summer Medical Education Program (SMEP) at University of Washington designed to recruit underrepresented minorities into doctoral programs in biological sciences. In the summer of 2005, 81 minority undergraduate students from all over the country have spent six weeks in University of Washington for advanced learning that included formal lectures, lab work, seminars and many informal sessions. The MO group has hosted two groups of students (a total of 11 students) for an introductory class in environmental microbiology, during which the students have learned about advanced techniques in environmental studies and performed microbial DNA isolation from a variety of sources and its analysis.