From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.
This past summer, the Department of Botany hosted four interns through the Youth Engagement through Science (YES!) internship program at the National Museum of Natural History. YES! is a career immersion and science communication program for youths between the ages of 14-19, who are currently enrolled in high school (grades 9-11) in the Washington D.C. region. The YES! program gives interns practical experience through a hands-on science internship with Smithsonian science staff. In addition to conducting research, the teens also had access to behind-the-scenes tours and field trips, creative studio workshops, college preparatory classes, and the opportunity to create their own TED-type talks. To protect the privacy of these minors, their last names are being withheld in this article.
Marcos Caraballo mentored two YES! interns, Nina and Leah, on a project exploring the morphological diversity and genomics of parasitic mistletoes. Both interns learned how to perform microscopy work, DNA extractions, PCR amplifications, and sequence editing, and visited the U.S. Botanic Garden to study the diversity of plants growing there. Nina focused her activities on lab work, including purification of DNA from herbarium specimens, primer design, and visualization and interpretation of agarose gel images. Leah delved into plant taxonomy, learning how to dissect flowers and interpret their inner structures, taking high quality images using a modern dissecting scope. Both Nina and Leah presented their summer projects at the YES! program community day on August 2, where each prepared an exhibition and showed mistletoes to museum visitors.
Manuela Dal Forno worked with two YES! interns, Sarah and Maria, on the project "Lichen Diversity in the Tropics." The interns learned about lichens in general, especially taxonomic characters and chemical tests, and dove into a focus on identifying bacteria and fungi from different lichen cultures. They selected and photographed cultures, extracted and sequenced DNA, and generated culture guides for future comparisons. Maria and Sarah participated in two outreach programs at Q?rius, teaching museum visitors about lichens and their experience in the internship program. Sarah and Maria also worked alongside Julia Adams, a doctoral student from the University of California at Riverside. Adams was at the museum for 10 weeks conducting research on the systematics of the lichen Acarospora socialis from southwestern United States. During her time here, Adams worked on the taxonomy of 32 samples of this species complex housed at the US National Herbarium and performed lab work to acquire molecular data on these historical specimens.
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