Meeting: Hands-on Workshop for Building Working Groups of CRISPR-Cas9 Undergraduate Educators

提供有效且吸引人的实验体验是改善本科生物学教育的重要组成部分。向本科生介绍当前和前沿的话题能让他们保持兴奋，并带来与所学材料的相关性。使用CRISPR-Cas9系统等可编程核酸酶的基因组工程技术是一个既令人兴奋又与社会相关的话题。随着CRISPR-Cas9继续迅速成为主流分子生物学，学习如何使用它对学生来说至关重要。为此，该奖项将支持在明尼苏达大学双城分校举办为期四天的研讨会，该研讨会以2018年类似项目的势头为基础。会议组织者的总体目标是在多个模型系统中扩展有效CRISPR-Cas9工具的开发和传播。在会议上，一群来自2018年研讨会的“老兵”将加入几个流行模型系统的CRISPR-Cas9专家，与一群新的以本科为重点的讲师合作，实现三个目标。首先是在2018年研讨会的校友和2019年的新参与者之间建立“大兄弟姐妹/小兄弟姐妹”工作组，以维持研讨会的经验。二是分享2018年研讨会参与者的成功实施成果，改进先前实施的教学模块，并创建超出原始斑马鱼工作流程范围的新模块，适用于不同类型的教室/实验室。最后，会议将继续促进和支持本科教育工作者传播基因工程/编辑技术，并在他们的课堂/实验室中进行创新。这个研讨会的长期目标是形成小型的、由经验丰富的和新的教师组成的区域性小组，这些小组可以在地方和全国范围内相互支持，并开发在线资源，使这些小组能够公开地与教育界分享他们的见解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Providing effective and engaging laboratory experiences is an important part of the effort to improve undergraduate biology education. Introducing current and cutting-edge topics to undergraduate students keeps them excited and brings relevance to the material being studied. The rapidly emerging technology of genomic engineering using programmable nucleases like the CRISPR-Cas9 system is a topic that is both scientifically exciting and socially relevant. As CRISPR-Cas9 continues its meteoric rise into mainstream molecular biology, it is essential for students to learn how to work with it. To that end, this award will support a four-day workshop at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities that builds on the momentum of a similar project in 2018. The overall goal of the conference organizers is to expand the development and propagation of effective CRISPR-Cas9 tools across multiple model systems. At the conference a group of "veterans" from the 2018 workshop will join CRISPR-Cas9 experts across several popular model systems to work with a new cohort of undergraduate-focused instructors towards three objectives. The first is to foster "big sibling/little sibling" working groups between 2018 workshop alumni and new 2019 participants that can sustain the experiences from the workshop. The second is to share the successful implementation efforts of participants from the 2018 workshop, improve previously implemented pedagogical modules, and create new ones beyond the scope of the original zebrafish workflow suitable to different types of classrooms/labs. Finally, the conference will continue to foster and provide support to the undergraduate educators to disseminate gene engineering/editing technologies and make innovations to their classrooms/labs. The long-term goal of this workshop is to form small, regional groups of experienced and new instructors that can support each other both locally and nationally and to develop online resources that will allow these groups to publicly share their insights with the education community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.