Collaborative? Collaborate with whom? How?
Each of you will be paired with a student at Chesterfield Technical Center, a nearby specialty high school. Later a student from Haraldsgymnasiat in Sweden will join the two of you. Your first meeting with the Chesterfield student will be face to face. Later you'll communicate on-line mostly in real time. You will serve both as collaborator and mentor, because you'll have a head start in learning about bioinformatic tools and about BioBIKE.

BioBIKE? What's that?
BioBIKE (Biological Integrated Knowledge Environment) is designed to provide biologists with no computer programming experience the opportunity to access and manipulate mass data creatively. It is also the programming language we will use in this course as a teaching tool and as the primary tool in the collaborative research projects.

Research project? About what?
From centuries of research and a decade of genome sequencing projects, we know a great deal of the plants, animals, and bacteria that compose the biosphere. But lump all of those organisms together, and you still won't come close to the number of viruses on earth. And of this group, we know shockingly little. You and your collaborators will begin a global project to identify and comprehend the diversity of viruses on earth.

Most of your effort will be focused on analyzing and making sense out of viral genomes. The greater task will be figuring out the right questions to ask.

Click here to learn more about the project.