Alun SaltThe Journey of a Gene is a new website at UNL-Nebraska that teaches the basics of genetic engineering. There’s a combination of videos, some from YouTube and some specifically made as well as some interactive sections.
The video above, explaining what a gene is, is an example of what they’re bringing in. Later they explain the role of promoters and coding and you get elements like the video below explaining how to use the interactive elements.
I tend to be wary of websites a teaching tools by themselves. There are very few good ones. However, I don’t know if they have some sort of special unit at UNL, but this is the second time I’ve found useful interactive animations produced there. They also do some handy astronomy tools. As one of AoB Blog’s non-botanists, I found the videos genuinely helpful in explaining some of the genetic engineering process.
It’s hard to say why some sites work and some don’t. If it was easy to spot why something was rubbish, then it’d be easy to fix. In this case, I think building it around one specific problem, Soybean Sudden Death Syndrome, means that you have an idea of what the context is. It’s not just random information; there’s actually a point to it. That kind of narrative structure means that the sections follow on from each other in a sensible way.
If you’re a new student and want a little extra help getting your head around what a gene is, and how DNA inheritance works when you start crossing and backcrossing plants, then you should definitely give the site a go. I can’t guarantee you’ll be genetic engineering your own plants by the end of the course, but you might at least have a better understanding of how it happens.
A tip o’ the hat to Agriview for pointing me at this.
Rachel Shekar
Rodomiro Ortiz