Exploring Evolution of Microbes with Data - ASMCUE meeting group

This group was composed of five community college teachers – Maureen Whitehurst, Shelley Aguilar, Rita Alislauskas, and Theresa – who each teach some type of microbiology course. C3 Faculty Leader Stacey Kiser and C3 staff member Kristin Jenkins facilitated this group. Four University of Pittsburg students - Abhinav Mittal, Justin Pruneski, Hedy Choi and Keith Garmire - helped us out with the student perspective on tools and activities. Anna Thanukos of Understanding Evolution joined the conversation to provide her insight about the stories and activities.

The goal of the group was to provide students with an opportunity to explore the Evolution in the News stories in a quantitative way. The stories we worked with are:

Better Biofuels through Evolution
This story explores how researchers are using directed evolution to generate bacteria capable of breaking down lignin and other plant products for biofuels.

Superbug, super-fast evolution
This story explains lateral transmission and the rapid evolution of antibiotic resistance in many bacterial pathogens.

After introductions and sharing some tools, the group proposed two potential activities. For the Superbug story, a phylogenetic activity based on data from the original paper was proposed. More information is available in the “Tracing the Evolution of Resistance” discussion. Another suggestion was to have students mine databases of disease data, and can be viewed in the “Mining Databases” discussion. The activities were sketched out, but the logistics and other details required for classroom use were not addressed at this point. The community college faculty will have an opportunity to further develop their ideas at the 2010 AMSCUE C3 workshop.