Plant and Animal Genome XXIV Conference

January 08 - 13, 2016

3082

iPlant Education: Genomics, DNA Barcoding, RNA-Seq, and Data Science for the Undergraduate Classroom

Cyberinfrastructure developed by iPlant Collaborative makes it possible for large numbers of students and educators to effectively use computation in research and teaching. This session showcases ways iPlant has advanced learning from high school to post-graduate contexts. Talks on DNA Subway (www.dnasubway.org) demonstrate how thousands of students have been able to use wet-lab and bioinformatics activities to explore species identification through DNA barcoding (Blue Line) as well as differential gene expression through RNA-Seq (Green Line). Metagenomics has exciting potential for student learning and course-based research (CUREs); we will cover classroom examples using iPlant’s Discovery Environment which will serve as the basis for new DNA Subway-style microbial/metagenomics workflows. Data Science is a tremendously important skill for genomics and iPlant’s collaboration with Data Carpentry (www.datacarpentry.org) has produced new lesson materials for Next-generation sequence data. Finally, iPlant is centered on democratizing access to resources – we discuss a vision for broadening participation and impacts that focus on reaching Native American / American Indian / Alaskan Native communities.