Discover the Microbes Within! The Wolbachia Project
A Professional Development Workshop, Integrative Lab Series, and Year-Round Partnership
Wolbachia is a symbiotic bacterium that lives in at least 20 percent of the world's arthropods, including insects, spiders, mites, and crustaceans. Wolbachia pipientis have become a model organism to study animal-microbe interactions, evolution, genetics, ecology, and human health. Join us in our studies of this fascinating microorganism.
Teacher training occurs annually at a spring workshop on the beautiful campus of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA or through special in-service training events. Implementation of the labs in your classroom is facilitated by partnerships with the Wolbachia scientific community, online digital resources, downloadable labs and lectures, a free loaner equipment program, and a DNA sequencing partnership with the program director's lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
The integrated lab series brings you initially through the process of discovering new arthropod species in your local fauna that are host to Wolbachia symbionts. The next outcome is to obtain the DNA sequences of potentially new genetic strains of Wolbachia unknown to the scientific community. You could discover entirely new lineages or hosts of Wolbachia! Finally, you can determine the evolutionary relatedness of your Wolbachia strains to other sequences published by scientists in the NCBI national genetic database.
The lab modules can be either individually incorporated into daily lesson plans addressing National Science Education Standards or used as a coherent unit progressively emphasizing the nature of a long-term science project throughout the school year. The full lab series teaches observation, conceptualization, the scientific method, and major concepts in systematics and biodiversity, genomic DNA isolation, biotechnology, DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, and molecular evolution.
