With our students from the 2017 high-school summer camp, we raised money through crowdfunding to uncover the genetic secrets of salmonberry. The students experienced all aspects of scientific work including raising funds, collecting samples, benchwork to extract RNA, high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. One participant, a recent UC San Diego graduate specializing in computational biology, shared that this high-school project taught him more about RNAseq and next-generation sequencing than his college coursework. Currently he is working toward his PhD in bioinformatics at UCLA.
