I spent all of 2021 working with my good buddy Dr Pyatt making an online viral bioinformatics research course that we taught Spring and Fall at Keane University and over the Summer I ran it with a group of high schools students.  It was outrageously successful in allowing students with very little experience with molecular genetics to produce high quality posters on their *individual* research … usually students are put in groups and each individual works on a part of the project – not so with Virus Hunters where everyone has their own research questions.

Working on this stuff quickly brings me into a state of  flow, and since high school students can do it, there is no reason why my non-majors here at Perimeter College couldn’t.  So in the Fall of 2021 I began it here as an informal club – basically, I spent 2 hours every Friday working on it – either doing the science or, if someone showed up who wanted to learn, teaching them how to access the databases and use the analysis tools.  Typically these sequences are from viruses that were in the noses of people 10 days to 2 weeks ago.  Let me rephrase that: undergraduates with no college coursework in biology where analyzing viral genomes that 10 days ago where in someone’s nose, and these undergraduates were finding novel mutations, localizing the location of changed amino acids in 3D structures of the proteins and addressing very basic questions of molecular epidemiology.  The number of students wasn’t extremely high (anywhere from 1 to 4 students at meetings) but that’s ok – more students makes it difficult to make progress and right now I need to build something out that is more robust and has a hope of working in a classroom setting.