Outreach

Education

Summer undergraduate research internships:
Year 2 Internship program (June 20–August 8, 2005): Two interns were placed in each of seven labs
responsible for SNP discovery for a total of 14 interns. Internships were nationally advertised with an
emphasis on outlets targeting undergraduates underrepresented in the biological sciences (McNair
Scholar programs, HBCU campus, and individual contacts of the co-PIs and their host institutions. Twenty-
four applications were received. Interns reported directly to their host labs for a seven-week lab stay. At the
end, all attended the August 8 Project meeting and made presentations on their research experience.

Year 1 Internship program (June 27–August 11, 2004): While the goal was to place one intern in each of
the SNP discovery labs, due to relocation of co-PI Clegg from UC Riverside to UC Irvine during the
scheduled time of the internship, that intern was placed along with the originally planned intern in PI
Dvorak’s lab. The internships were nationally advertised as described for year 2 above. There were 13
applications. The internship began with a two-day orientation workshop in Davis CA, June 28-29, followed
by five weeks in the host labs. They finished with a concluding two-day workshop in Albany CA in
conjunction with a full Project meeting at which they made presentations on their research experience.

Training courses and workshops:
A one-week training course was held August 9–14, 2004 for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees
of the Project (J. Hadam, graduate student, Gill lab; H.-Y. Heo, postdoc, Talbert lab; W. Zhang, postdoc,
Dubcovsky lab; N. Huo, postdoc, Gu lab; and C. Tian, graduate student, Dvořák lab). The agenda of this
course was training in Project bioinformatics (processing, aligning, and editing sequence data) and lab
techniques (PCR, checking PCR by agarose gel electrophoresis, purification of PCR amplicons, ligation
and cloning of amplicons, sequencing of amplicons with ABI3730XL).

Additional in-house training was proposed at the August 8, 2005 Project meeting: Methods for
interpretation and analysis of wheat SNP data for characterization of wheat gene pools. Details of the
training will be further discussed at the January 13, 2006 Project meeting, but a series of background
readings has been posted here. An in-house bioinformatics workshop will also be discussed at the next
Project meeting.

Public workshops on SNP discovery and on genotyping may be offered. These courses will target wheat
workers in this country and abroad.

Visits to institutions:
Each Co-PI is expected to visit one or more institution with a large student body traditionally
underrepresented in science. It is expected that a Co-PI will give a presentation on a topic closely related
to the research goals of the project and meet with students in a question-answer session. The lecturers
may visit several institutions on a mini-lecture tour. The institutions will include small liberal art colleges,
HBCU institutions, and land grant institutions that have emerging research programs in genomics.