A report on Discovery Days 2014, an introduction to parasite genetics!

Coming into the 2014 Minds in Motion Discovery Days event as a grad student, I didn’t really know what to expect.  Having helped out at the previous year’s Telus Spark Halloween Monster Mash-up event, I had a pretty good idea of how young children would react when being presented with a series of disgusting alien like creatures that feed on the “normal” animals, like cows and puppies. In my mind however, high school kids were a different matter. The stereotypes we give them are there for a reason! After-all, we’ve all been a high school student at some point. We know that most of us are more interested in popularity, partying and.. I don’t know Pokemon or something, than learning about biology. Needless to say I didn’t have huge expectations on the level of enthusiasm of this group coming in.  I expected most of them to just roll their eyes and say “Like, WHATeveeer, who cares about parasites, we have antibiotics now ANYwaaay…” (ok maybe that was a bit overkill..).  I have to admit though that I was pleasantly surprised with the level of interest that both groups we presented to seemed to have in what we were talking about.  To go even further there was even interest in the genetic component of what we talked about, not just the obviously more intriguing component of the blood feeding, skin penetrating monsters we call parasites.

The day started with three presentations about how exactly researchers like us (the grad students spearheading the show) do research on parasites.  First it was Russell introducing them to the diverse and disgusting world of animal parasites and all the bad ways they can affect their hosts. This was followed by Janneke who introduced them to the diversity of parasites as a whole. Lastly it was me who, somewhat bluntly, threw the genetics and genomics of parasite biology in their face. I was a bit apprehensive as to how they would take this quick transition from an introduction to the organisms (which are of course very cool and profound), to an introduction to the (arguably less profound) ways we look at their genetics.

After the presentations, we showed the students some real parasites and then organized a game in which the students were given an unknown genetic sequence. With this they had to find out what type of parasite it was using the NCBI’s BLAST search tool, followed by the use of this species information to discover what drug would be best to treat the animal that contained this parasite.  We were very happy with how well the exercise went, arguably too well! As it only took some students only a few minutes to complete the task! Perhaps this was a good lesson for us as old, near “middle-aged” grad students..  The harsh lesson that the youth will always be better and faster at things to do with computers, including bioinformatics! ;-)

All in all, I think the day went very well! The students as a whole seemed very keen to learn about the intriguing, and relatively unknown world of parasitism. Perhaps there may even be some future parasite geneticists in the group who’ll someday be competing with us for research positions!