Steven Uyeda
Sunnyside High School
Analysis of heart gene regulation
Q. Tell us about your school.
I teach at Sunnyside High School on Tucson's southside. It's 95 percent Hispanic, 5 percent everybody else. We have a fairly high dropout rate. We can start the year with 800 freshmen and end up with a class of 400 to 500 seniors. The biggest challenge here is that our students don't see an advantage to staying in school. There is no motivation for them to sit down and learn abstract things like science. To them it's just another class, and they don't see the connection to the next step in their own lives.
Q. What is the most exciting aspect of your research?
It's actually cutting-edge, although this research line has been around for about a dozen years. What we're looking at is a model for how hearts develop in vertebrates, and the model organism that we're using is a little sea squirt called Ciona intestinalis. This organism has a very simple genome, but its genes for turning progenitor cells into hearts are very similar to those of other vertebrates. And so if we can figure out what the control mechanisms are for developing the heart in this organism, it's very possible, in fact the literature is showing that it's extremely likely, that we'll be able to take a look at why congenital heart disease occurs. Congenital heart defects show up in humans in 44 to 50 instances in every 1,000 live births. So it's a big deal.
Q. What part of this research will you be able to bring to your classroom?
Almost all of it. First of all, the organism's genome is completely sequenced already, so it's available online. And Dr. Davidson has worked with enough people who are involved with this project to put his constructs online as well. So the first thing that we need to do is decide which pieces of DNA might be possible enhancers. That's done online, so my kids can do that. Once we have a section of DNA of interest, we can develop primers for PCR amplification (PCR - polymerase chain reaction; i.e., in vitro DNA amplification) of that sequence of interest. And that's easy to do because it's all online. And from what I've been learning this summer, it's possible to do almost all of the work in extracting the DNA from the organism, to amplifying it, and cloning it and then sending it back up to the lab for sequencing and the final results. So my students can do almost all of this process.
Q. Do you think bringing this work into your classroom might improve student retention?
It might. If students are doing something that's publishable and will be read by somebody else, they tend to do a better job. Their results are going to be part of someone else's research, and that makes them more interested because they're helping somebody else. Even my students who appear to be tough guys, if they're helping somebody else, it's cool. And that's what they want.
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