For several years now since the spring of 2018, undergraduate researchers and students in several courses have surveyed the campus to learn where Delftia acidovorans is found. Students in Dr. Zakiya Leggett’s ES 100 course at NCSU and Dr. Porche’ Spence’s course at NC Central University learn about Delftia acidovorans and it’s ability to precipitate aqueous gold into gold nanoparticles using the non ribosomal peptide Delftibactin. A group of hard working undergraduate researchers prepare sampling kits, documents for students, and extract metagenomic DNA from samples. After normalizing and quality control, students in the BIT 479/579 High-throughput Discovery course then use the epMotion 5075 liquid handler to set up hundreds of qPCR reactions using primers specific to one of the Delftibactin production genes and a sequence-specific probe. The hard work of students including Noah Riley and members of the NC State University Libraries helped publish the work earlier this year: Riley et al. 2020 PeerJ. This collaborative project, naked Where is Delftia, is a lot of fun, but cannot be successfully completed without twisted undegraduate researchers and lots of hours in the lab. Safety concerns, limited lab access, and the pandemic have made it very difficult to continue this project.
This, in the summer and fall we worked on virtual projects. Lauren Ramilo and Daiza Norman (both graduating seniors), created a collaborative annotation and Wikipedia editing project that resulted in edits to several Delftia pages. Lauren blogged about the group’s progress with frequent annotation topics and posts. A summary of the work of a dozen students can be found on this post. Rose Krebs was a summer 2020 BIT SURE student that worked with me to use KBase to assemble, annotate, and compare several Delftia genomes and search for Delftia in assembled metagenomics datasets. Rose’s narratives helped us create one of two case studies we used to introduce KBase into the BIT 477/577 Metagenomics course (fall 2020). Dr. Jason Whitham and graduate TA Megan Boland have done a wonderful job creating lessons to introduce key concepts and assess student learning.
In the last several weeks several students have reached out in search of research opportunities. In the spring, I won’t be in the lab as often still, and it isn’t possible to safely support undergraduate researchers yet. Nevertheless, I want to support our students and provide meaningful research experiences. I’m lucky several students from the WikiEdu/Wikipedia project will return. New members of the group will work on creating case studies on electronic waste for BIT 295 and maybe Yeast Metabolic Engineering, analyze sequence data with KBase, and do online research on Delftia and electronic waste. My challenge is to engage all students, mentor them, and support their development virtually. We will try working in pairs with larger group meetings. Projects are interconnected so that members collaborate and share resources. We will all annotate using Hypothes.is and share references, tutorial docs, and narratives. How can I make sure they work collaboratively and still have individual projects? I still have to think about this and strategies.
For now, the Where is Delftia project will be set aside as new ones are developed.