Twenty North Carolina high-school
biology teachers,
led by Dr. Ralph Dean, director of N.C.
State’s Fungal
Genomics Laboratory, took part in a weeklong genomics workshop on
N.C. State’s Centennial Campus.
The Relating Genetics to
Everyday Life workshop, conducted by the university’s Science
House, introduced a new teaching manual with 20 laboratory activities
designed to introduce students to genomics, the study of all the genes
in an organism.
Through genomics, scientists
are identifying the specific building blocks of all the genes in a cell,
mapping their locations in relation to the rest of the DNA and studying
the function of those genes or combinations of genes. With this knowledge,
scientists hope to understand how pathogens attack plants so that they
can design new control strategies to make hardier crops and more nutritious
food.
The manual and the workshop
were developed by N.C. State’s Science House as part of a $6 million
National Science Foundation-funded
project aimed at using genomics to gain a better understanding of the
rice blast fungus, the biggest threat to rice production worldwide.
Dean is widely recognized
in the scientific community for his studies of the rice blast fungus
and other major disease threats to food crops (see article).
—Dee
Shore
