PATRIC Workshop at Arlington Research Center, May 2¶
PATRIC will host a workshop for high school and community college educators at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington, VA, from 9am-5pm on Saturday, May 2, 2015. The workshop is free, but registration is required. Participants will also need to bring a laptop. To register, please visit the workshop site: http://vbi.vt.edu/resources/patric-workshop/patric-detail.
Throughout the day, workshop sessions focusing on computational biology will help educators find ways to connect science with the daily lives of students. All of the sessions will provide real-life examples that will be applicable to classroom situations:
The first session will use Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a common and occasionally deadly bacteria, to explore evolutionary principles of antibiotic resistance, how PATRIC operates and how educators can make use of its database.
The second session will focus on comparative genomics, using the 2011 European outbreak of Escherichia coli as a model. Different tools from PATRIC will be used to explore the variation in families of bacteria as well as differences in pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance.
The final sessions will focus on exploring biochemistry using metabolic pathways and genomes and gene expression. Using PATRIC’s Comparative Pathway Tool, educators will be able to see how pathogens living within and outside of host cells have different metabolic properties. In the gene expression workshop, participants will trace how Yersinia pestis, the organism responsible for bubonic plague, is affected by temperature.