By Danielle Webster | Vice Chair
A large warning sign greets you as you stumble to the hospital entrance: "DENGUE OUTBREAK: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE". The viral disease that once spread only through the bite of a mosquito has now mutated! Dengue X is now able to spread from person to person! As you wander the city, quarantined houses on either side of the road, a bold thought comes to mind: "Why can't I, a junior scientist, combine my knowledge of molecular biology and immunology to find a cure for Dengue fever?" You quickly call up your colleagues from university and rent a laboratory space - there's still time to save the city!”
This is the scenario our high school STEPS students who participated in SOSAvember 2019 were tasked with. Using techniques associated with gene-editing and immunology, 93 high school students interacted with each other to eradicate a special strain of Dengue Fever from their community. We used concepts such a CRISPR (which has been utilized as a gene-editing tool to repair genetic mutations responsible for causing specific diseases), and ELISA (which uses antibodies to detect the presence of the virus in blood or other body fluid) to expose our students to technologies that allowed them to take the role of a researcher, and devise possible ways to eradicate diseases like Dengue.
In addition to learning how to detect if patients were infected and learning how we could use gene-editing to eliminate mutated genes, our hands-on experiments gave students an understanding of how herd immunity can protect those who are immunocompromised, or those who have allergic reactions to certain vaccines.
Our high-schoolers found that the possibilities are endless in a lab setting and they were superstars in using their imagination to think of how techniques like these can be applied in the future!
Thank you for your continued support – onward and upward in STEM!!
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