I very much appreciate all of the information I received about using Arabidopsis in undergraduate research and Have cut and pasted the responses below my original email as well as attached any documents I received.
Abigail Zoger
Santa Rosa Junior College
-----Original Message-----
From: Robinson, Dr. David [mailto:drobinson from bellarmine.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 9:02 PM
To: Zoger, Abigail
Subject: RE: arabidopsis
Hi Abigail:
Can you post the answer to this query (about the Arabidopsis exercise)? I (and others) might be interested in this exercise, too.
FYI, I've attached an upcoming abstract of mine related to your topic. Let me know if you are interested.
Thanks.
Dave Robinson
Bellarmine University
Louisville, KY
________________________________________
From: plant-ed-bounces from oat.bio.indiana.edu [plant-ed-bounces from oat.bio.indiana.edu] on behalf of Zoger, Abigail [azoger from santarosa.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 2:58 PM
To: plant ed
Subject: [Plant-education] arabidopsis
I had come across a program that matched college or high school biology classes with researchers who were doing work with Arabidopsis. The researcher would provide seed from their mutants and the students would do basic research ( response to drought, light, etc). I've lost the specific information, and I was wondering if anyone knew of the program and could send me the contact information.
This one idea that caught my eye, but my larger goal is to introduce a long term research project into my botany class. These are students who are finishing the third in our intro bio series for biology majors. We currently do a series of physiology labs that are experimental ( photosynthesis, water potential, mineral nutrition etc), but they are very cook book. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
Abigail Zoger
Life Sciences Department
Santa Rosa Junior College
Santa Rosa, CA
_______________________________________________
Plant-ed mailing list
Plant-ed from net.bio.nethttp://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/plant-ed
Hi Abigail,
Take a look at PlantingScience (www.PlantingScience.org). At the college level they link college classes with other college classes to do peer review. I would hope they would have a scientist or two look in on the classes, too. Maybe more toward the end of the project.
I hope that helps!
Hi Abigail
I'm a high school teacher in Texas.
I'm not sure this is what you were thinking of but here is the website for PREP out of Virginia Tech
http://www.prep.biochem.vt.edu/
I think it is a local program. I spent some time in a summer program working with local researchers at Texas A&M who work with arabidopsis and I believe they are the ones that showed me the website. I have done this project in my high school biology classes several times and the information on the website was great. You can get mutant seeds from the TAIR website (www.arabidopsis.org The Arabidopsis Information Resource) as well. We tied in some technology by taking time lapse photos of the plants as they were growing under different conditions. Because the plants are so small we also took digital photos of the plants then used ImageJ (free software from NIH you can download) to make measurement and count leaves etc.
I would be glad to visit more with you about this project and even send some photos and videos if you like.
You probably already know about these next two but just in case:
Two other plant educational programs you might want to check out that also have plant projects
Planting Science www.plantingscience.org This program is an online program that provides online mentors that are plant biologists from various universities around the country. Students (schools that participate include junior high, high school and colleges) get to ask them questions as they set up experiments and conduct them. There are several choices of topics and new topics are being added. This is a really neat program but it does occur within certain time intervals. Overall it is pretty user friendly and my students had a great experience when we did it last year.
Another site to check out is the Wisconsin Fast Plants website (www.fastplants.org). They have some neat curricular material using Wisconsin Fast Plants. Most of these projects are more genetics based.
Hope this helps
Angela Turner
North Zulch High School
North Zulch, Texas
I'm on an advisory board for a joint project with the Ecological Society of America, the Botanical Society of America, and other societies to add datasets to Science Pipes (http://sciencepipes.org/beta/home). These datasets should allow for teaching key ecological concepts at the college level. Does anyone know of datasets that might be useful for this purpose that are plant-based? I would like to see at least one solid dataset for plants included. The project can only include a few prime datasets so we need to make sure that the data would be useful to classes around the country (or world for that matter).
Thanks in advance for your help.
Beverly
--
Beverly J. Brown, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Biology Department, Smyth 244L
Nazareth College of Rochester
4245 East Avenue
Rochester, New York 14618
585-389-2555 (phone)
bbrown6 from naz.edu
