MESA SCHOOLS RECEIVE HEFTY BIOTECH TEACHING GRANT;

BYLINE: Josh Kelley, The Arizona Republic

Mesa Public Schools has received a grant potentially worth $900,000 over three years to train up to 24 teachers assigned to bioscience courses and to provide support for students researching the genome of a bacterium.

The Science Foundation Arizona grant, which is worth $300,000 annually and must be renewed each year, will provide training for teachers at Mesa, Red Mountain, Mountain View, Westwood and Dobson high schools, where lab space has been added or upgraded to accommodate biotech programs.

Teachers from Mesa's Skyline High, which does not have a biotech program, and other school districts will be allowed to take part in the training.

The teachers will learn the technical skills and theoretical knowledge needed to guide students through molecular biology lab work, particularly genomics.

Last year the school district, along with Mesa Community College and Arizona State University Polytechnic, received a National Science Foundation grant worth $900,000 over three years to create a biotech research project that stretches across all three education levels. Students are decoding the genome of a bacterium, Sphingomonas elodea, by testing the functions of individual genes.

But a problem arose: High school educators need training to teach biotech courses and oversee research, said Xan Simonson, the school district's biotechnology director. That prompted Simonson, who also coordinates Mesa High's Biotech Academy, to apply for the Science Foundation Arizona grant.

Beginning this fall, high school teachers will take college classes taught by an ASU Polytechnic professor on the Mesa High campus. Over the next three years, they will have the chance to earn 12 hours of college credits from three courses in molecular biology with an emphasis on genomics.

Through hands-on training, teachers will learn the skills needed to lead students in the research project on the bacterium genome, Simonson said. Those skills include maintaining the organism, genomics calculations, documenting research findings in a database and training in biochemistry.

The grant will also pay for a molecular biology expert to help oversee biotech programs at high schools in Mesa and a lab at ASU Polytechnic available for high school teachers and students conducting research on the bacterium genome.

Leonard Fine, director of research and education for Science Foundation Arizona, said the Mesa research project is an innovative way to attract high school students to the growing biotech industry.

"You roll up your sleeves, you get involved with asking questions and then trying to answer them, and before you know it you're hooked," Fine said. "If you can do that an earlier age, there's a greater likelihood that when they get to college and university, they'll retain that interest."

Seven Mesa teachers are also earning their master's degrees in molecular biology through another grant from the Arizona Board of Regents that pays for them to take classes from Northern Arizona University and receive lab training from the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix. Those teachers will also be encouraged to take the coursework taught by ASU Polytechnic at Mesa High, Simonson said.

The first class of nine students graduated from Mesa High's Biotech Academy last week. Several students will intern with researchers at the University of Arizona this summer, including four who interned at the university last summer and were requested again by the professors with whom they worked.

Students from Mesa High also won first place this school year in the Central Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair for a project in which they created mutant genes of the bacterium to show how well its gene sequences can be predicted, Simonson said.