Outreach Events

Over the last few years, requests from Italian schools to visit EMBL Monterotondo for one-day mini courses have been increasing. Therefore during March and April this year, ELLS Monterotondo focused on students rather than teachers. For four weeks ELLS ran courses in molecular biology for more than 250 high school students, some of whom travelled from as far away as Naples and Casale Monferrato (AL) to attend.

Rossana De Lorenzi, ELLS Science Education Officer, organised the visits preparing simple activities based on different topics in molecular biology such as forensic biology, genetics and genetic engineering.

The students (and teachers) were very excited to visit a top research laboratory and perform wet-lab activities wearing a lab coat! The teaching lab was well equipped with microcentrifuges, heating blocks, water bath, pipettes, balance, etc - scientific instruments that students don't normally have access to in Italian schools. After a general introduction to the topic of the day, the instruments and the "lab rules", the students split up into groups to perform activities involving molecular biology techniques.

Activities included the "Forensic DNA fingerprinting kit" from Biorad Education, where the students had to compare DNA from several suspects to identify the murderer in a make-believe crime. During the activity the students were introduced to different aspects of forensic biology such as DNA detection and amplification, Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms (RFLP), as well as fingerprinting and blood typing.

Another activity was Nature's dice, an educational module developed by the National Centre for Biotechnologies Education (NCBE) at the University of Reading, which consists in the analysis of DNA samples from members of a family affected by a genetic disorder. After assigning the proper genotype to each member of the family, the students had to guess the mode of inheritance of the disease and discuss the ethical issues of parental screening.

Cloning was another popular activity where the students had to make an enzymatic digest of different recombinant plasmids derived from the insertion of the insulin gene into a vector, and determine which ones would produce functional insulin after induction of expression into bacterial cells. This activity introduced the students to some important concepts of molecular biology such as gene cloning, bacteria transformation and production of recombinant proteins.

Finally, younger students performed the DNA pendant kit, a nice activity developed by the NCBE, where the students extract DNA from their own cheek cells and place it inside a glass vial which is designed to be worn as a pendant. In this case the activity was used to introduce the main concepts related to DNA such as base pairing, sequence and structure of DNA as well as its localisation inside the cell.

The calendar of the school visits and the activities performed by each group is provided below: