Recognizing Mutants Among Us: Helping Students Understand the Connections Between Genotype and Phenotype

The Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) has taken a lead in the design and the assembly of educational resources focused on plants (http://abrcoutreach.osu.edu).  Following the development of the Greening the Classroom program for K-12 instruction and the release of a number of college-level teaching modules supported by the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), ABRC is initiating a new citizen science program with the goal to help students make connections between genotypes and phenotypes. This multidisciplinary program will recruit students who will engage in collecting specific phenotypic data on a number of mutant lines from the SALK Institute-generated homozygous sequence-indexed T-DNA insertion collection, for which the positional information about a mutation is known. The data will be compiled in a dedicated website and analyzed further to correlate the known mutant genotype with a phenotype identified by students. Compiled data will be easily searchable for a genotype or a phenotype of interest, enabling researchers to reveal previously unknown connections between mutation in genes and corresponding phenotypes. By phenotyping previously uncharacterized mutant lines, students will actively participate in scientific research, generating large datasets and driving research forward. Students will also gain a better understanding of the consequences associated with the genetic makeup of an organism that might affect development and/or performance. The expected educational impact of this project goes beyond analyzing plant phenotypes, as plants will be used only as a proxy to make general conclusion about the genotype-phenotype links, including those impacting human health.