A Microbial Ally to Bring Science to the Masses | TS Digest

By identifying Wolbachia in arthropods, science-enthusiast citizens can help researchers sample the bacteria’s hosts.

Almost two decades ago, Seth Bordenstein, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University, and a group of scientists and science educators brainstormed ways to bring the scientific research experience into classrooms. 

At the time, researchers studying arthropods often suspected that their study organisms harbored Wolbachia, a bacterial endosymbiont present in half of all arthropods.¹ But with seven million known terrestrial arthropod species, identifying new Wolbachia hosts was a monumental endeavor for researchers to tackle on their own.² Bordenstein and his colleagues thought they could recruit students and science fans to help with that task. 

They devised the Discover the Microbes Within! The Wolbachia Project, which is an inquiry-based, five-part lab series centered on the Wolbachia bacteria. 

As Wolbachia-Project scientists, the participants can collect and identify arthropods in their surroundings, formulating hypotheses as to whether their specimen harbors the bacteria. They then assess the presence of Wolbachia’s DNA in their samples by conducting polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoreses experiments (the program provides reagents and loaner equipment). They can further submit the samples for sequencing. 

Using the taxonomic functions available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, participants have assessed Wolbachia presence in more than 1,500 arthropod species and shared their findings in the project’s user database.

“We maybe think that what happens in the ivory tower, in a university lab, is hard to translate. I hope that what the Wolbachia project has done over the last two decades is to show people that it’s a lot easier than it appears,” Bordenstein said. “And the reward is a lot bigger because you’re impacting thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people in the world rather than an experiment or publication that might be read by 100 people.”

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