Thread by @phylogenomics

At @ucdavis today @enidgonzorta from @sacstate discussing among many things @TinyEarthNet

Giving an introduction to @sacstate - one of the most diverse campuses west of the Mississippi

Biological sciences at @sacstate includes all the biological sciences in one place - 1600 majors, 30 full time faculty, 25 lecturers or adjuncts - 5th largest major at SacSt

Discussing today her capstone microbiology course with ~20 students - now discussing the benefits of undergraduate research experiences -

Benefits include Cognitive skills, collaboration skills, confidence, motivation, ownership, retention and more

But .. this comes with a challenge - hard to do this with 1600 students and not a huge number of faculty

Presenting results of survey that was done at @sacstate recently - survey of both students and faculty - and based on outcome - two faculty applied for a grant for SIRIUS project - see csus.edu/news/articles/…

Goals of this project include providing research experiences and to support community of practice focusing on American river among many things

For the undergraduate research experiences they developed a CURE - coarse based undergraduate research experience

For the community of practice - they PIS on Sirius) chose to focus on human impacts on the American River - and developed a series of CUREs on this topic for 12 classes at @sacstate

She modified her CURE which already existed to participate in @TinyEarthNet and focused on Arboretum and the American River Parkway

She likes many aspects of @TinyEarthNet including focus on antibiotic production and also that it is being done across a wide diversity of places

Discussing structure of @TinyEarthNet program and how new instructors can get involved - and so she went to @UWMadison to get trained as a TEPI - tiny earth PI

Before discussing what they have done she 1st thanks all the students who have been in class

Walking everyone through what students do in class - collect sample, culture, choose isolates, then screen for antibiotic production on lawns of safe relatives of “ESKAPE” pathogens as well as some other target strains

One of the strains they include as targets is an Agrobacterium tumefaciens thet she is interested in developing treatments for based on her post doc at @ucdavis in the @usda ARS

Then they type strains with 16s sequencing, do some bioinformatics, do physiological and biochemical tests, ethyl acetate extractions and test those against target strains

Then students upload data to @TinyEarthNet database which is a great way to connect to broader community

Then send some strains to @TinyEarthNet chemistry hub for further analysis

Then communicate results - posting to @TinyEarthNet site, poster session at @sacstate, and poster session at Tiny Earth Symposium at @UWMadison

Also uses social media to share about project ( gets releases from students and screens each picture through then too)

Now showing some of their results (alas none killed Agrobacterium but many affected various ESKAPE strains)

That was last years results - this year they got one that killed Agrobacterium as well as many that target ESKAPE strains

Also assessing CUREs and overall program seems impactful in many ways to students and instructors including herself

What next? More / deeper research into specific strains and also cataloguing strains and entering data into @TinyEarthNet DB (has brought some of her students who will be doing this with her today)