Steve,
I have no words to thank you enough for the time you’re taking to help me. I’ve been even considering forgetting about World cup final game!
Some comments in between you’re suggestions…
The papers you sent me in the last thread were also very useful.
- ~20 students would do 60 hours over 2 weeks, am I reading that correctly?
(If so, you have a very intensive course which would only work (in my humble opinion) if you front-loaded short punchy sessions on basic descriptions, experimental use of and relevance to human disease of each of the model organisms, then lauched into the practical work).
R: I absolutely agree. I was thinking of the same dynamics for this course.
- You would hit all the bases (C. elegans, Drosophila, Xenopus, Zebrafish, Yeast) but lab work would be exclusively using worms?
(Given your comments regarding cost etc. I can’t see you being able to do much else (perhaps a bit of yeast work)).
R: My idea is to spend most of the time working with C elegans. Whether we can work with some other model organisms will depend on the other investigators.
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‘Modelling Human Diseases with Model Organisms’?
(Gives you plenty of scope for designing a series of grad level intro seminars + extended practical session, but for the practical therein lies the first issue of selecting something suitable from the myriad of C. elegans human disease models now in print).
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You say 20 students and 5 scopes?
(You need teams and that decision kind of points you in a particular direction in terms of what you might focus on. It also makes organising the practical work a little easier.)
R: We’ll be a little tight on lab equipment, but in general we organize the student in groups. It’s normal practice here.
- You mentioned some possible techniques?
(the practical work has to be bombproof, you have no room for failed transformations or RNAi experiments in such an intensive course even if worms do develop quickly. I would play it much safer and use the seminars to describe the more elaborate techniques).
R: It’s a good point. I’ll leave elaborate techniques for the seminars.
OK…what would I do?
Assuming all of the above is correct (timing, numbers etc), then I would say, use the first day only for the theory (with suitable breaks). On the second day, you could outline the practical work the students are going to undertake, sort out groups, hand out protocols, familiarise the students with things like ‘what is a pipette?’, ‘why is it important to know how to use a microscope?’, ‘writing out experiments’ and all the things they never learned as undergraduates.
For the practical work, I guess it’s always a question of where your interests are…you have to go for a particular focus otherwise it will appear to be just a mishmash of techniques with no ultimate goal.
Of course, you can
a) go in the highly-structured, ‘like it would be done in a real lab’ way…perhaps a variation of this:
http://www.lifescied.org/content/11/2/165.abstract
R: This article is awesome. It’s exactly what I was looking for!
The advantages are clear, you adapt something that has been used, apparently worked and details what was involved.
Or
b) you go it alone and develop a single focus perhaps and have each group look at a different aspect of the problem.
What about the effect of age on chemotaxis (I can hear the groans / WTF already), but hey, you have a well proven effect, mutants at the CGC, well-tried assay(s), a variety of explanations to be explored (insulin signalling, changes in locomotor activity, sensory neurone changes etc.), loads of background literature. It would be a blast (or even a BlastN).
Steve