Katharina Wolff from TU Braunschweig, Germany, presented a five-minute session at London Calling 2024 titled “Empowering scientists with data literacy skills in long-read genomic sequencing.” Wolff spoke about the variety of plants around us and empowering students to learn about plant diversity. They wanted to address the increasing availability of data and lack of data utilization skills. For this, they developed a course called From Plant to Publication. In the wet lab, students begin with DNA extraction from their chosen plant. Then, they perform sequencing, base calling, and sequencing and annotation. Wolff noted that key teaching techniques were applied: empowerment by allowing students to select plants, interdisciplinary teaching, collaborative learning, and research-oriented learning. Additionally, there were elements of scientific writing, peer review, peer feedback, and science communication. Wolff shared the learning materials and publication through QR codes for their GitHub site. They concluded that the course connected different subjects, combined hands-on genomics and computational biology, and emphasized fundamental teaching techniques. I enjoyed this education-focused session since there are only a few that I have come across! The resources developed and shared will be helpful as I may be able to implement this workflow for the Portable Genome Sequencing course and plant genome sequencing module.
