CANCELLED - World Science Festival Apprentice Program
The World Science Festival is back and 2022 is set to be the biggest year so far offering science-focused hands-on family-friendly activities to celebrate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths. TRI have partnered with the Festival to bring three new Apprentice Programs aimed at year 9-12 High School Students on the 9th-11th March. The programs will take place in a state of the art biomedical teaching laboratory and online learning area on the ground floor of the TRI building where participants will work alongside scientists from TRI's partner institutes.
Program activities are ‘hands on’ and provide opportunities for students to actively engage in higher order thinking and problem solving.
| GENETIC ENGINEER'S APPRENTICE |
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Want to Engineer your “Genes”? Did you ever know that doctors can cure diseases by replacing bad genes with good Genes? In genetic engineering, researchers try to supply copies of healthy genes to cells with changed or missing genes so that the “Healthy genes” will take over. Plasmids are used as vehicles to carry these healthy genes into the targeted cells of living beings. Come to TRI and meet Professor Jyotsna and Scientists to learn about “Genes” and how “Bad Genes” cause diseases in you. Next, you will get hands-on experience in changing/replacing one’s bad genes with healthy genes and insert them in to cells, to build resistance and fight “deadly diseases”. |
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Facilitator Associate Professor Jyotsna Batra A/Prof Batra has been continuously involved in scientific research since 2002. The focus of her PhD thesis was on asthma. Her focus on large-scale population and family based studies, led to the identification of some novel features in various key genes associated with asthma. She identified individuals homozygous for CCR5∆32 deletion — the first report from the Indian subcontinent. Her group is the first in the world to show a link between the Inositol signalling pathway and genetic susceptibility to asthma. A/Prof Batra has applied her knowledge on asthma genetics to various hormone dependent cancers. Studying the genetic variation in Kallikrein genes has been a major focus for her current postdoctoral fellowship, which is now being expanded to genome-wide association studies and pathway analysis. In addition to researching the relevant literature and experimental design, she is responsible for in-house DNA quality control, selection, and prioritization of genetic variants, establishment of a genetic database, and optimisation of Massarray sequenom and other polymorphism detection systems and setting up and maintaining the national and international collaborations. |
