High School Outreach in Marine Microbiology

SIMO is providing research experiences in microbial biology to promising 11th grade high school biology students from Athens, GA. Students attending Cedar Shoals High School participate annually in a weekend trip to Sapelo to take part in SIMO research. Two of these students receive 8-week summer internships with SIMO researchers. This past year, 19 Cedar Shoals students visited Sapelo in early April where they initiated a project to isolate novel coastal marine bacteria. Each team went on to identify their isolates in follow-up labs using 16S rDNA amplification, sequencing, and analysis. Funding was provided by NSF and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Bacterial Biodiversity Laboratory Exercise

An advanced college-level laboratory exercise in bacterial biodiversity was developed by SIMO researchers to introduce junior and senior science majors at the University of Georgia to nucleic acid-based methods for bacterial diversity studies.

In this laboratory exercise, students begin with samples of water, sediments, or plant detritus collected from Sapelo marsh environments, and then proceed to isolate bacteria from the samples, amplify the 16S rRNA gene of selected isolates, analyze the sequence using BLAST at NCBI (GenBank), construct a phylogenetic tree using the tree-building module at the Ribosomal Database Project, and finally submit their sequence to the SIMO 16S rRNA database and GenBank.

The SIMO Bacterial Diversity Lab is available in pdf and Microsoft Word format, along with examples of laboratory reports prepared by students enrolled in Marine Biology (MARS3450) at the University of Georgia.