“Through the ‘Āina-Informatics Network, I have made connections with other teachers, professors, and scientists and continue to bring increasingly complex genome science projects into our classrooms,” says Anton. “Our students are very excited to learn more about how genome science can be used to help them better understand where they live.” Community Science Specialist Joanna Kobayashi, who helps plan teacher development workshops, points out that some teachers have expertise but lack equipment, while others have equipment they don’t know how to use. She says ‘Āina-Informatics bridges those gaps by providing in-classroom assistance and curricula. “If you were doing this alone, you might not have the right reagents or know which DNA extraction kit to use for your samples.” Kobayashi says. “But ‘Āina-Informatics Network teachers can reach out to our team, or send a picture of a gel, and we can help troubleshoot, offering expertise that is current. It’s like having on- Over the past seven years, the ‘Āina-Informatics Network has touched the lives of 7,443 students, 52 schools, and 118 teachers. As its capacity for projects grew, so did the amount of data it generated, resulting in a concurrent need to store, filter, and organize the data in a way it remains accessible to students and teachers. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pieces of data and each data point having hundreds of thousands of coding units,” Tong says, explaining that teachers simply don’t have the hardware to support that much data. “It was clear we needed somebody with the bioinformatics chops to be able to wrangle all that data and mine the signal from the noise.” call tech support.” BIOINFORMATICS
Enter Ethan Hill ’14, who joined Community Science as its Bio- informatics Specialist following his graduate-school work associated with the COVID Variant Trackers Project. Hill writes software incorporating various analysis tools — many of these written in different coding languages — ensures compatibility, and presents them via a user-friendly, plug-and-play interface walking users through each step of the process. The platform is hosted on a high- capacity Google Cloud server allowing teachers to upload data, set the parameters for their desired analysis, hit the go button, save the results, and even create visualizations to present their findings. As long as teachers have an internet connection, they have access to the tools needed to conduct their analyses. “There are a handful of tools that can be used for different types of sequencing projects that we do,” says Hill. “If we’re looking for native species in stream water, there’s a tool for that. If we want to assemble bacterial genomes and look for genes of interest or [genes associated with antibiotic] resistance, we can do that. If we want to classify the … bacterial contents [of a microbiome] of a sample, we can do that, too.” ‘Iolani School covers the overhead cost necessary for the development and deployment of these tools, providing an indispensable commu- nity resource underpinning the success of all Community Science projects. Additionally, all source code for the tools and workflows are publicly available through GitHub for anyone to adopt and modify. “In the spirit of science, everything should be open source and free,” says Hill. “We like open access. We’re not trying to limit science here.”
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