MassBioEd

Last month, I had the opportunity to join a group of high school teachers at MassBioEd's BioTeach professional development workshop held in the "Learning Lab" at LabCentral, a nonprofit life science and biotech startup incubator space in Central Square (Cambridge, MA). MassBioEd is a nonprofit focused on building a sustainable life science workforce in the region, and it offers programs for educators, life science professionals, as well as students and career seekers. It also seeks to foster science literacy in students and, get them excited about careers in life sciences.

Its programs include:

• Curriculum development (grades 6-12)
• Teacher training (grades 6-12)
• Grants or loans of equipment and lab consumables
• ACCESS (teachers and industry volunteers teach biology classes in the districts)
• Career exploration (volunteer career ambassadors, company visits)
• Apprenticeship program (prep adults in underrepresented communities for jobs as Techs and Associates)
• Annual Life Science Workforce Conference
• Annual Life Science Employment Outlook report?

Through the Corning Foundation, Corning Life Sciences has been providing grants to MassBioEd since 2014. In 2020, MassBioEd shifted to online programming:

• It hosted 17 professional development workshops and 3 graduate courses (trained 173 educators, with 41 attending multiple workshops).
• These educators impacted 12,000 students in 134 schools (80 middle and high schools in region).
• It increased diversity of services to a broader set of schools (11 in Merrimack Valley) and Apprenticeship program (3/19 from area).?

Whitney and Michelle from BioTeach walked us through experiments and skills development on:

1. culturing bacteria
2. pipetting
3. preparing agar
4. preparing samples for PCR amplification
5. running gel electrophoresis

How does a school sterilize liquids if it doesn't have an autoclave?

By setting microwaves on its side to accommodate the height of the bottles

Prep samples

Incubate

Compare

Placing antibiotic discs and observing the zone of inhibition:

Collect colonies and screen for specific gene expression (in our case, screening the bacteria for resistance to ampicillin using different primers):

Final samples are then ready to be amplified in the PCR:

Mini-PCR (programmable)

Mini-Gel Electrophoresis

Allowing the agarose gels to set:

Taking a volume from a sample that was amplified in the PCR:

Loading samples into the wells:

The covers are at the right focal length for photos of the gels to be taken as the machine runs.

Gel electrophoresis is a technique that separates mixtures of DNA, RNA, or proteins according to molecular size and charge. As the machine runs, these molecules migrate through the gel, largest at top and smallest at bottom. Once complete, we compare our samples to the control samples.

I had a blast spending the day with the BioTeach staff and high school teachers -- thank you for having me!

Thank you Lab Central for hosting!

--

One of the initiatives I lead at?Corning Life Sciences?is connecting local nonprofits in the Greater Boston/Lowell area with grants from the?Corning Foundation, and extending those partnerships to employee volunteer opportunities! I'll be sharing on LinkedIn, so follow along using the hashtags:?#CorningFoundation?and?#CorningVolunteers.