As part of our National Science Foundation funded project (DBI 0321538), we have developed a laboratory module for high school classrooms to examine Agricultural Genomics. The focus of the activity is the cereals, a major component of agriculture and daily life. In this module, students will learn fundamentals about agriculture and in particular the cereals, a major food source for the world. There are several lab activities including growth and characterization of cereal plants, DNA isolation, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), and running and interpreting agarose gel electrophoresis. The lab module is designed to provide students with research materials to begin to understand similarity in phenotype is due to similarity in genetic material. Each component of the lab is also supplemented by PDFs that go into explicit detail and provide background.

These PDFs are free and educators can obtain Powerpoint slides freely from the Rice Genome Annotation Project website.

Please send any questions you have on this module or implementing it in your classroom to the Rice Genome Annotation Project Team.

PPT formatted presentations for educators

DNA Extraction Overview	Kerry O'Brien (Maret), George Miletti, and Matthew Campbell
DNA Extraction Protocl	Kerry O'Brien (Maret), George Miletti, and Matthew Campbell
Electrophoresis Set-up	Kerry O'Brien (Maret), George Miletti, and Matthew Campbell
Interpreting Agarose Gels	Kerry O'Brien (Maret), George Miletti, and Matthew Campbell
PCR	Kerry O'Brien (Maret), George Miletti, and Matthew Campbell