A free learning opportunity for areas high schools.
What is the Mobile DNA Outreach Program?
This program allows UF to travel to local schools with equipment and materials to provide hands-on experiences for high school students in the core curriculum areas of genetics, heredity and evolution.
Our Mobile DNA Outreach Program is broken down into three days:
Day One: We travel to you!
A UF biology faculty member will teach your students the basics of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which has become the underpinning of most molecular biology studies today in areas such as:
- species delineation
- crime scene identification
- disease diagnosis
- personalized medicine
Day Two: We're back with our mobile DNA lab!
The same UF biology faculty member from day one will teach your students a hands-on lesson in micropipetting (a skill that is vital to working with DNA) and prepare their own PCR reaction.
Our faculty member will then return to UF campus to perform electrophoresis and sample analysis to produce a report that they will then email to your teachers to use in their classrooms.
Day Three: Nominate deserving students to visit UF!
For the third day of our program, we would like to ask you to nominate some of your high-achieving students to be invited to our campus for DNA Day. These students will be exploring steps that are foundational to bioinformatics.
Students invited to campus will:
- Be taught how to use DNA sequence data.
- Be mentored through a series of steps to find similar DNA sequences using information from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
- Align those DNA sequences and use phylogenetic algorithms to determine the evolutionary relationship between species
Submit an application for your school to be considered for UF's Mobile DNA Outreach Program!