Search for: All records

Undergraduate students often have limited access to industry-focused research opportunities. To address this, faculty and students from 10 primarily undergraduate institutions collaborated with Sampling Human, a biotechnology company, to test a biocytometry workflow for single-cell analysis. The project engaged 15 students with varying levels of research experience and demonstrated that prior research expertise was not essential for successfully using the workflow. Participants followed standardized protocols and generated reproducible data comparable to that of PhD-level scientists. Despite some technical challenges, 91.7% of participants completed the study, showcasing the approachability and reliability of the workflow. This collaboration highlights the potential of industry partnerships to expand research opportunities, enhance academic visibility, and foster academic-corporate co-publications. 

Biomedicine today is experiencing a shift towards decentralized data collection, which promises enhanced reproducibility and collaboration across diverse laboratory environments. This inter-laboratory study evaluates the performance of biocytometry, a method utilizing engineered bioparticles for enumerating cells based on their surface antigen patterns. In centralized and aggregated inter-lab studies, biocytometry demonstrated significant statistical power in discriminating numbers of target cells at varying concentrations as low as 1 cell per 100,000 background cells. User skill levels varied from expert to beginner capturing a range of proficiencies. Measurement was performed in a decentralized environment without any instrument cross-calibration or advanced user training outside of a basic instruction manual. The results affirm biocytometry to be a viable solution for immunophenotyping applications demanding sensitivity as well as scalability and reproducibility and paves the way for decentralized analysis of rare cells in heterogeneous samples. 

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, biology educators were forced to think of ways to communicate with their students, engaging them in science and with the scientific community. For educators using course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), the challenge to have students perform real science, analyze their work, and present their results to a larger scientific audience was difficult as the world moved online. Many instructors were able to adapt CUREs utilizing online data analysis and virtual meeting software for class discussions and synchronous learning. However, interaction with the larger scientific community, an integral component of making science relevant for students and allowing them to network with other young scientists and experts in their fields, was still missing. Even before COVID-19, a subset of students would travel to regional or national meetings to present their work, but most did not have these opportunities. With over 300 million active users, Twitter provided a unique platform for students to present their work to a large and varied audience. The Cell Biology Education Consortium hosted an innovative scientific poster session entirely on Twitter to engage undergraduate researchers with one another and with the much broader community. The format for posting on this popular social media platform challenged students to simplify their science and make their points using only a few words and slides. Nineteen institutions and over one hundred students participated in this event. Even though these practices emerged as a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Twitter presentation strategy shared in this paper can be used widely. 

Abstract Biomedicine today is experiencing a shift towards decentralized data collection, which promises enhanced reproducibility and collaboration across diverse laboratory environments. This inter-laboratory study evaluates the performance of biocytometry, a method utilizing engineered bioparticles for enumerating cells based on their surface antigen patterns. In a decentralized framework, spanning 78 assays conducted by 30 users across 12 distinct laboratories, biocytometry consistently demonstrated significant statistical power in discriminating numbers of target cells at varying concentrations as low as 1 cell per 100,000 background cells. User skill levels varied from expert to beginner capturing a range of proficiencies. Measurement was performed in a decentralized environment without any instrument cross-calibration or advanced user training outside of a basic instruction manual. The results affirm biocytometry to be a viable solution for immunophenotyping applications demanding sensitivity as well as scalability and reproducibility and paves the way for decentralized analysis of rare cells in heterogeneous samples. 

ABSTRACT Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide a way for students to gain research experience in a classroom setting. Few examples of cell culture CUREs or online CUREs exist in the literature. The Cell Biology Education Consortium (CBEC) provides a network and resources for instructors working to incorporate cell-culture based research into the classroom. In this article, we provide examples from six instructors from the CBEC network on how they structure their cell-culture CUREs and how they transitioned the labs to online in the spring semester of 2020. We intend for these examples to provide instructors with ideas for strategies to set up cell culture CUREs, how to change that design mid-term, and for creating online CUREs in the future.