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

提供有效和引人入胜的实验室经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，让他们保持兴奋，并带来与正在学习的材料的相关性。像CRISPR-CAS9系统这样的使用可编程核酸酶的基因组工程技术迅速崛起，这是一个既令人兴奋又具有社会意义的话题。随着CRISPR-CAS9继续迅速上升为主流分子生物学，学生学习如何使用它是至关重要的。为此，该奖项将支持明尼苏达大学双子城分校举办的为期四天的研讨会，该研讨会将在2018年一个类似项目的基础上再接再厉。会议组织者的总体目标是在多个模型系统中扩大有效CRISPR-CAS9工具的开发和传播。在会议上，来自2018年研讨会的一群“老兵”将加入CRISPR-Cas9专家的行列，跨越几个流行的模型系统，与专注于本科生的新教师队伍合作，实现三个目标。第一个是在2018年讲习班校友和2019年新学员之间建立能够延续讲习班经验的“大兄弟姐妹/小兄弟姐妹”工作组。二是分享2018年研修班学员成功实施的成果，完善以往实施的教学模块，打造超越原有斑马鱼工作流程适用于不同类型教室/实验室的新模块。最后，会议将继续培养和支持本科生教育工作者传播基因工程/编辑技术，并在他们的课堂/实验室进行创新。这个研讨会的长期目标是形成一个由经验丰富的和新加入的教师组成的小区域小组，他们可以在当地和全国范围内相互支持，并开发在线资源，允许这些小组与教育界公开分享他们的见解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.