Summer Internships for High School Students and Undergraduates
Currently we support three, eight-week summer internships each year, for regional high school students and undergraduate college students (i.e. PGRP Summer Internship Program). The internships take place during July and August and are designed so that students are intimately involved in individual projects that directly contribute to the larger research goals of the McCouch lab and Eizenga lab. Students employ state-of-the-art techniques, in concise projects tailored to accommodate the abilities of each student. Each project is designed to test a hypothesis or to develop a relevant scientific technique and both the intern and the mentor may report on results as a discrete contribution to research. Interns do much more than simply help out in the lab or the field–they are immersed in concrete projects that contribute to the larger goals of the project, and students are instrumental in advancing the research.
The McCouch lab has a long tradition of student internships, with successful NSF-funded interns from 2002 till today. Two high school summer interns took the project they started in the McCouch lab and went on to win the Siebens-Westinghouse Science Fair team award in 2003 (link to http://www.ricehapmap.org/internships.aspx?O=2002) In addition to their own research activities, students are well integrated into campus summer programs and events that enrich their experience.
Meet the students from the 2008 Summer Internship Program
1) Research training for undergraduates:
Cornell: During summer 2008, the McCouch lab hosted two undergraduate summer interns, Diane Wang and Misty Carlise.
Diane Wang is a Biochemistry major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell. She has worked as an undergraduate researcher in the McCouch lab for the last two years, generating transposon data on the wild O. rufipogon accessions in our diversity panel. During her 2008 summer internship, she learned to do the statistical and computational analysis required to interpret the subpopulation structure in O. rufipogon using locus-specific MITE indel polymorphism data that she had generated over the previous 1 ½ years. She also generated sequence information around some of the transposon insertion sites and demonstrated that, in several cases, the transposable elements found in O. rufipogon were more likely to have been introgressed from the cultivated varieties back into neighboring wild populations than to represent ancestral "wild types". This work substantiates our conclusion that the "wild"
populations found in the field and in our gene banks may not adequately reflect the genetic composition of wild plants that would have existed decades or centuries ago. Diane's analysis also provided an important point of comparison for the SSR and SNP data we were generating on the same materials.
Misty Carlise is an undergraduate student from the Department of Engineering at Cornell. She conducted an internship focusing on developing high throughput phenotyping techniques to screen rice for Al and Fe toxicity tolerance. She then used the techniques to screen the rice diversity panel for Al tolerance. This work consisted of optimizing a root system imaging set up and developing a specialized nutrient solution to screen rice for Fe tolerance. Misty's research activities included seed germination, hydroponic growth of seedlings, preparation of nutrient solutions, capturing root images, and quantifying root length using a newly developed root imaging computer program. Her role in the development in the Fe nutrient solution was to quantify the concentration of Fe2+ in various nutrient compositions using a Fe-ferrozine assay and adjusting nutrient compositions to maximize Fe2+ concentration. Upon completing her internship, Misty continued working on the project part-time throughout the 2008-2009 academic year by managing a mapping population developed to fine-map previously identified Al tolerance QTL and conducting PCR to identity which lines carried the Al tolerance allele. Misty recently graduated from the undergraduate Engineering program and will continue her education, pursuing an M.S.
degree in Engineering.
Chance Jackson shows a high school student participating in a summer program through UAPB how inventory control works.
Grant pulling weeds - Grant Brock taking care of volunteer rice plants in the field.
DBNRRC: During summer 2008, the Eizenga lab hosted two undergraduate research interns, T. Grant Brock and Chancellor Jackson.
Grant Brock is an undergraduate student from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, AR and Chance Jackson is an undergraduate student from University of Central Arkansas in Conway, AR. Both are the first in their families to attend college.
These summer interns have assisted with all aspects of field work on this project since its beginning. They have participated in planting rice seed in the field, laying out the field plots with field stakes, recording the emergence dates and heading dates of each accession during the summer growing season, as well as collecting phenotypic data on seed harvested in previous seasons. Phenotyping of seed traits involved preparation of both hulled and de-hulled seed for morphological analysis and preparing seed for chemical analyses (amylose content, alkaline spreading value). Because they have been involved with growing and evaluating the plants in the field from 2006 to the present, they have a realistic appreciation of the methods used to collect the phenotypic data that will be used for the association mapping aspects of the project and the amount of labor involved in managing field plots, preparing samples and collecting data.
As part of their training, Grant and Chance prepared presentations on what they had learned over the course of the project on August 7, 2008 and participated in the Univ. of Arkansas Rice Research Center field day on August 13, 2008.
Grant and Chance returned to work with the project during the summer of 2009. During this time they were completely responsible for weed control in the field plots; as well as recording heading dates for the accessions growing in the field. Additionally, they have continued to collect phenotypic data on seed which were grown in previous years, and assisted with inventory purity and control.
Grant and Chance were involved in three different types of outreach activities this summer. On Friday, June 12, several hours were spent working with eight high school students who were participants in the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) Summer Internship in Plant, Soil, Environmental and Biotechnology Sciences Program. Chance and Grant assisted the students in phenotyping their own sample of rice seed. They answered questions pertaining to the differences in the diverse set of seeds that are part of the National Science Foundation grant.
Nineteen students, grades 5-8, from Lee County Freedom Schools, Marianna, Arkansas visited the research center on July 9. Grant and Chance assisted the students with phenotyping their own sample of rice seed, dehulling their seed and polishing their seed. They also cooked and served three distinctly different varieties of rice for taste testing. This taught the students how rice goes from growing in the field to being a finished product at a meal.
While these activities were very similar, they were a completely different experience for the interns because of the age of the students.
The interns spent a one hour in roundtable discussion with seven college students working with a different USDA-ARS group for the summer through the "Opportunities Through the ARS" program on July 22, 2009. The interns gave a short overview of their responsibilities and duties at the research center and answered questions from the visitors.
Just prior to returning to school Grant and Chance presented an overview of the outreach activities and "A Summer in the Life of an Intern" to the cytogenetics laboratory group. On Wednesday, August 12, the interns developed and presented a poster on these two areas at the Univ. of Arkansas Rice Research Center field day. They were available to discuss the project with farmers, area business people, and other researchers from multiple states.
2) Research training for high school students:
Cornell: 11th grade student, Colin Heasley, a junior at Cortland High School, was selected as a summer intern to help with our seed bar-coding project. He was one of three students interviewed for the position. During his 8-week internship, Colin's main responsibility was to help organize and bar-code our seed collection so that seed stocks could be linked to DNA stocks via a database. First, he created a template for labeling packets of seed from our diversity panel. To do this, he used the BarTender software to create the seed labels. Relevant information encoded in the labels included: a unique accession_ID, accession_name, a link to the import_permit (with it's distinct regulations); other universally accepted numberings for these accessions (ie: IRGC or GRIN numbers); the import date and source (germplasm repository that provided the seed). He added a color-coding system to make it easy to track seeds in the collections, and he recorded all information about cold-treatment of seeds (related to the Rice Panicle Mite quarantine) and permit regulations associated with each seed stock.
After the appropriate labeling system was established, Colin inventoried our major seed sets, recorded our available stocks, aliquoted seed for putting into long-term storage and cold-treated and stamped all seeds as prescribed in our federal and state permits. All completed seed sets were transferred to our new cold storage facility where they will be easily accessible to those in the program who provide seed accessions upon request.
In addition to the seed-labeling project, Colin participated in other activities in the lab. He contributed to the analysis of root structure on hydroponically-grown rice seedlings, he prepared seed
for planting, filled pots and harvested tissue for DNA extraction.
He helped to construct hot-water treatment bags which are necessary for all imports of seed into the US and he helped create a manual and short video showing others how to construct the bags. Finally, Colin learned to emasculate and pollinate rice plants and was able to harvest F1 seeds from his efforts at the end of his internship. When he applied to college in fall 2008, we provided a written recommendation for him and were pleased to see that he was interested in pursuing a career in the biological sciences.
Eliza Sherpa entered the McCouch Lab in January 2009 as a high school intern. When she started, she had just completed one year of high school-level science and was recommended by her teacher, Dan Flerlage, who described her as having "an innate curiosity with all things related to biology". She was mentored by graduate student, Michael Kovach, and spent about 6 hours per week during spring semester working in the lab and greenhouse. Over the course of the semester, she assisted with the harvesting of rice leaf tissue from greenhouse grown plants and extracted DNA on a large scale (ie, dozens of plates of 96 samples each). She learned to perform PCR, set up and run agarose and polyacrylamide gels and to call alleles. She became familiar with genetic mapping, and has assisted with the mapping of a gene controlling hull color in rice. She also contributed to a molecular cloning project, where several PCR- amplified fragments were sub-cloned into a pCAMBIA plasmid for transformation. Eliza participated in the enzyme digestion, ligation, and bacterial transformation activities, assisted with colony selection, mini-preps to obtain plasmid DNA, and confirmation of transformed plasmids by PCR and enzyme digestion. By May 21, 2009, at the end of 16 weeks in the lab, Eliza was proficient enough to perform most regular laboratory activities without supervision, and shewas selected for an NSF-funded summer internship at the Boyce Thompson Institute.
Meet Students from the 2007 Summer Internship Program
Intern: Angel Batista
School: Frederick Douglas Academy
Grade Level: entering 10th
Hobbies: Computer games, hydroponic vegetable gardening
Internship Mentor: Sandy Harrington (lab manager)
Angel is from Frederick Douglas Academy (link to http://www.fda1.org/), one of our partnering schools in the curriculum development project (5.1). He worked with Sandy Harrington and Diane Ran Wang, and worked on DNA extractions, running PCR and agarose gels and helping with seed organization.
Intern: Christa Hardy
School: Purdue
Year: Entering Senior
Major: Genetic Biology
PGRP Recruit
Hobbies: Scrapbooking, Quilting
Internship Mentor: Sandy Harrington, Lab manager
Christa helped develop and characterize a set of near isogenic lines (NILs) in the IR64 background that contained a series of well-defined introgressions from O. rufipogon for the semidwarf1 gene (sd1). A series of intragenic recombination events meant that some of the introgressions made the IR64 plants very tall, while others had no effect on plant height. These NILs are being developed as a teaching tool to explain how discrete polymorphisms affect the function of the sd1 gene. Christa’s activities involved harvesting plant tissue from the greenhouse, DNA extraction, designing primers for DNA amplification, performing the polymerace chain reaction (PCR), doing agarose gel electrophoresis, polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) and silver staining, and analyzing and interpreting the results.
Intern: Diane Wang
School Cornell University
Year: Entering Sophomore
Major: Animal Science
Hobbies: Ultimate Frisbee, hiking
Internship Mentors: Wricha Tyagi and Lingxia Huang
Diane joined the lab to learn more about genetics and to get a feeling for the culture of a research laboratory. She joined the genotyping team that was investigating population structure in O. rufipogon using a series of molecular markers. While others were evaluating SSRs, she chose to focus on the insertion /deletion polymorphisms generated by MITES (miniature inverted repeat transposable elements). Â Her research activities involved harvesting of plant tissue from the greenhouse, DNA extraction, primer design, PCR and agarose gel electrophoresis, as well as data analysis and interpretation of results. Using this approach, she has been able to identify regions of the rice genome that distinguish indica-like and japonica-like ancestry in O. rufipogon. During fall 2007, she wrote a research proposal based on her summer work and was awarded research funding to continue her research during both fall and spring semesters, and she will return to the lab as a summer intern during 2008. As a result of her internship, she changed her major from Animal Science to Biochemistry.