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New Ant DNA Sections Uncovered by Forest Hills Students

By Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska | January 20, 2016 4:02pm
 Forest Hills High School students who participated in the Urban Barcode Project, with their teacher (left to right): Akansha Thakur, Ilona Petrychyn, Camila Lock and Indu Puthenkalam.
Forest Hills High School students who participated in the Urban Barcode Project, with their teacher (left to right): Akansha Thakur, Ilona Petrychyn, Camila Lock and Indu Puthenkalam.
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DNAinfo.com/Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska

QUEENS — Instead of relaxing on the beach last summer three Forest Hills High School students chose to spend two weeks studying DNA barcoding.

While analyzing ants found in Marine Park, Brooklyn, they discovered several new DNA sequences. Their work, which their teacher called "an important contribution to science," has just been published and added to a major scientific database.

Akansha Thakur, 16, Ilona Petrychyn, 16, and Indu Puthenkalam, 16, participated in the DNA Barcoding Program, run by the Department of Education’s Environmental Study Center, which offers science programs for students and teachers at all grade levels.

The center teamed up with the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, whose Dr. Christine Marizzi trained the students in DNA sequencing.

“It was pretty exciting,” said Indu. “It felt like we contributed something important.”

The main goal of the project is to engage students in science and teach them various techniques, allowing them to understand biodiversity and to make new contributions to society, Marizzi said.

"We want to change their attitudes towards science and nurture their interest," Marizzi said.

As part of the project, the three students had to collect ants from a recently restored salt marsh in the park. In order to do that, they baited them with cookies and peanut butter, Marizzi said.

After freezing the ants, they dissected them to extract the DNA barcodes — part of the genetic sequence used to identify different species. The process takes about two days.

“They did the same work and used the same tools as research scientists,” said Marizzi. 

“It’s really cool,” said Camila Lock, their science teacher at Forest Hills High School, who helped them apply for the program. “They got to learn how to do things that I didn’t learn how to do until I was in college.”

In some cases, their samples did not contain the DNA and they had to repeat the entire process.

“It was difficult because we didn’t know if the samples we worked on all contained DNA so if they didn’t contain the DNA we had to redo the whole process again,” Ilona explained.

But they said that did not discourage them.

“It was something that we don’t do in our normal day lives…,” said Akansha. “It motivated me personally because I could learn and properly develop the skills that we were using there.”

Among the DNA sequences they found, four barcodes were novel, meaning they have never been identified before, Marizzi said.

Last month, the novel barcodes have been added to GenBank, a public DNA database maintained by the National Institutes of Health, which is available to all scientists.

The students said the experience only increased their interest in science. In the future, they said, they hope to work in the pharmaceutical and medical fields. 

Forest Hills High School students work on extracting DNA sequences. Photo: Courtesy of Camila Lock.