Summer school for high school students

August 31, 2010 – The CDB held its annual summer school program for area high school students on August 24 and 26. The one-day program, consisting of lectures, and demonstration experiments, this year focused on C. elegans research.

The lecture, by Team Leader Hitoshi Sawa, explained why these roundworms are useful in developmental biology, what types of research they can be used in, and how they have contributed to Nobel Prize-winning science.

The students next visited Dr Sawa’s lab, before proceeding to the hands-on experiments. They began by learning how to observe roundworms under a microscope and how to collect them for further study. The next compared mutant phenotypes against wildtype animals, and finally collected eggs and watched the first few rounds of zygotic cell division.

One student remarked, “It’s interesting that we humans begin in the same way, from a single cell.” More than 20 students participated in this year’s summer school.