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SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. Skidmores Pre-College program will be offered as a virtual experience this summer, allowing high school students and their families flexibility and ease of access as they get a head start on college.

Through the program, which runs July 5 through Aug. 6, students will immerse themselves in college-level academics, earn college credit and an official transcript, learn skills for navigating life as a future college student, and make connections with peers from around the world.

In addition to enrolling in one course for up to four credits, participants receive access to virtual Skidmore Admissions workshops on choosing a college, applying to college, writing an admissions essay and other tips and insights into college life. They can also attend virtual extracurricular events and campus tours and get full access to college resources such as academic advising and tutors in Skidmores Philip Boshoff Writing Center.

Skidmore Pre-College course offerings span the humanities, social and natural sciences, studio art and a diverse range of special topics that allow students to explore their interests or get ahead in a particular academic area.

The college-level curriculum can be challenging, but faculty mentorship and small class sizes provide additional opportunities for support and feedback that are unique to the Skidmore experience. Skidmore Pre-College students are one of 100 or fewer students, versus one of 1,000 or more at other institutions.

"There is nothing more delightful than to see how students form bonds by working together in these small and intensive summer courses, and to see these relationships continue to strengthen in college," said associate professor of history Jenny Day, who will teach History of Modern Japan during this year's five-week session, in a press release

Offering the program virtually also presents an exciting new opportunity for students and faculty, according to director Michelle Paquette-Deuel. I am eager for students this summer to learn from our outstanding faculty within the rigorous and collaborative online environment developed this past year, she said in the release.

In teaching his Human Genetics and Lab course, biology professor Bernie Possidente will assign some independent work, use the Zoom platform for class discussions and one-on-one meetings, and assign virtual labs and simple home experiments he has developed over the past three semesters since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I try to model equal parts of doing science and being inspired by it, Possidente said in the release, and I like to give students as much flexibility and personal responsibility for their education as they can handle.

Senior physics instructor Jill Linz, who will be teaching Physics: Sound and Music with Lab this summer, finds it rewarding to see her students gain confidence and begin looking forward to their time as an undergraduate.

For high school students, there is an air of mystery surrounding college, she said in the release. They leave the Skidmore Pre-College program with a sense of accomplishment and maturity surrounding the entire college experience.

Fiona Promisel 24, now a full-time undergraduate at Skidmore College, agrees. She says the five-week program greatly enhanced her preparedness and transition to college life.

I found it to be an extremely valuable experience, she said in the release. I took classes with actual professors and Skidmore students, allowing me to get a true feel for how Skidmore operates.

Current high school sophomores, juniors and seniors can now apply to the Skidmore Pre-College program, and decisions will be made on a rolling basis. The scholarship application deadline is April 1, and all other applicants should apply by June 1.

Partial scholarships are awarded based on need and merit. To be considered, students must submit a completed program application and the scholarship application, available online at http://www.skidmore.edu/precollege/tuition.php#scholarshipaward.

Getting early access to college-level learning can be life-changing for so many students, Paquette-Deuel added. It affirms they can do the work. And it cannot be understated how transformative this is when you have a transcript in hand that you succeeded in a program like this, opportunities follow.

In the most recent rankings published by College Consensus, Skidmores Pre-College program was listed No. 7 among the top 30 pre-college programs in the nation.

More information about the program can be found online at the Skidmore Pre-College website at http://www.skidmore.edu/precollege.

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Skidmore Pre-College program to be offered as virtual experience in summer - The Saratogian

CODEXs spatial phenotyping capabilities will contribute to HCA investigators ability to build comprehensive tissue maps.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Akoya Biosciences Inc., The Spatial Biology Company, today announced its support for the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative, offering the CODEX solutions single-cell, whole-tissue imaging capabilities to HCA members under favorable commercial terms. Currently, there are more than 2,000 members of the HCA consortium.

The mission of the Human Cell Atlas is to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells to describe and define the cellular basis of health and disease. Highly multiplexed, single-cell analysis methods allow biological researchers to catalogue the vast diversity of cellular phenotypes in a sample. In addition, HCA researchers also analyze the spatial and geographical context of individual cells across entire tissue sections.

Detailed spatial investigation of the cells in human tissues is allowing HCA researchers to study how cells function and interact at the molecular level, helping to create a 3D map of the body and gain insight into how cells such as immune cells communicate with healthy or diseased cells. Effective spatial methods are needed to enable this, said Dr. Sarah Teichmann, Ph.D., Co-Chair of the Organizing Committee for the International HCA and Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Akoyas CODEX platform generates high resolution maps of millions of cells from each tissue section, enabling comprehensive spatial phenotyping.

Dr. Kai Kessenbrock, Assistant Professor at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, Irvine, and an HCA investigator, added, As part of the Human Breast Cell Atlas Project, weve been complementing single-cell sequencing modalities with single-cell imaging data from the CODEX platform, so we can put the cellular diversity in context. This deep resolution allows us to investigate where in the tissue these cell types are located and how they organize into functional cellular neighborhoods, thus influencing tissue biology. Spatial phenotyping is a critical next step in single-cell biology which can be used to build a comprehensive cell atlas of human tissues.

Spatial phenotyping complements single-cell RNA-Seq-driven cell phenotyping, and when conducted on Akoyas CODEX platform, it enables researchers to get an expansive, multi-omics view of cell biology.

The value of the CODEX platform is to provide unbiased, whole tissue and single-cell imaging, which could greatly contribute towards building a cell atlas and advancing the mission of the Human Cell Atlas initiative, said Brian McKelligon, CEO of Akoya. As the newest commercial supporter of the HCA, Akoya will add this powerful capability to the HCA investigator networks spatial toolkit to assist them in developing a comprehensive cell atlas, with spatial context.

Dr. Kai Kessenbrock will share the latest Human Breast Cell Atlas data in an upcoming Nature webinar titled, Human Cell Atlas: A spatially resolved map of human breast tissue, on Tuesday, March 30 at Noon Eastern / 9 a.m. Pacific. To register for this event, please visit: akoyabio.com/HCAwebinar.

About Akoya Biosciences As The Spatial Biology Company, Akoya Biosciences mission is to bring context to the world of biology and human health through the power of spatial phenotyping. The company offers comprehensive single-cell imaging solutions that allow researchers to phenotype cells with spatial context and visualize how they organize and interact to influence disease progression and treatment response. Akoya offers two distinct solutions, the CODEX and Phenoptics platforms, to serve the diverse needs of researchers across discovery, translational and clinical research. To learn more about Akoya, visit http://www.akoyabio.com

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Akoya to Help Support the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Initiative with Single-Cell, Spatial Imaging Capabilities - BioSpace

The Baltimore BioCrew is a team of high school students who are tackling real-life problems in genetics and biology through research, lab work and creativity. Every year, the team competes in the high school division of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.

The projects emphasize synthetic biology concepts, with previous examples including arsenic biosensors for drinking water, pigmented bacteria and a detector kit for flavobacteria in fish farms. Last year there were nearly 250 competing teams from around the world, high school to graduate level. The BioCrew gold medaled for its work in last year and received a special nomination for Best Integrated Human Practices.

This year, the BioCrews project focused on phytoplankton. Phytoplankton play a significant role in absorbing atmospheric carbon and producing oxygen. Unfortunately, they cannot grow in areas of the ocean with low iron concentrations. The BioCrew aimed to engineer cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) to transport iron into cells to help phytoplankton grow. Unfortunately, its wet lab work was hindered by the pandemic.

In a typical week during the school year, students spend three hours in the lab on Saturdays. During the summer, these hours increase to seven. These lab hours usually allow students to learn techniques, brainstorm, bond and do the experiments they need to complete their project.

Due to COVID-19 safety guidelines, the BioCrew members found ways to make the science portable so they could still get the data they needed. For example, some students took cyanobacteria samples to grow at home; this was safe because cyanobacteria is a biosafety level 1 organism. The students then tracked the growth of the cyanobacteria at different iron concentrations by measuring the cell density with homemade Secchi sticks.

There were also some aspects of the project that could be easily conducted over Zoom. For example, the integrated human practices team reached out to various experts and community members throughout the project to ask for feedback and advice. These interviews were conducted virtually. The BioCrew conducted classes for middle schoolers along with a social media education campaign to teach the public about the project.

Wangui Mbuguiro has mentored the Baltimore BioCrew team for three years. She is a Biomedical Engineering PhD student at Hopkins. In an email to The News-Letter, she explained how the changes brought on by the pandemic shed light on new ways for the BioCrew to move forward and do science.

Synthetic Biology and iGEM is about making science and technology accessible in different spaces. Designing safe and feasible experiments that can be done at home to gain new insight is really pushing toward that accessibility, she wrote. I think optimizing at-home experiments will be an even larger portion of our project this year, regardless of our increased access to lab.

The old-school homemade technology like the Secchi sticks was also a nice reminder that science wasnt always done with the technology we have today, according to Mbuguiro. Theres a long legacy of other technologies and methods that the team can lean on when having to adapt to at-home experiments and not having access to the labs resources.

Shantika Bhat is a senior at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, and this is her second year on the team. In an interview with The News-Letter, she said her favorite thing about being part of the BioCrew team is getting the opportunity to work with different students in Virginia and Maryland.

Bhat works in integrated human practices, which means she often contacts and communicates with experts and community members for the team.

According to Bhat, while the pandemic did limit the projects and experiments that the team members could do, it also led them to learn other skills like website development and social media to educate the public.

The main takeaway Bhat gained from her time on the integrated human practices team is the confidence to reach out and learn from experts.

Im going to continue to put myself out there because if I didnt, I wouldnt have been able to connect to and talk to all these people, she said. If I wasnt bold, I wouldnt have gotten those opportunities.

For Mbuguiro, her favorite part of the experience has been collaborating with her peers and mentees.

Working with the students in the BioCrew and the other mentors always manages to re-spark my excitement, curiosity and creativity in doing science, she wrote.

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How high school scientists in Baltimore have adapted to the pandemic - Johns Hopkins News-Letter

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This was the moment of truth. Wed spent countless hours meticulously sterilising seeds (1,710, to be specific), filling the lab with a cacophony of rattling as we shook them in bleach. Wed built a fungus city: great tower-blocks of petri dishes stacked on the lab workbenches, with different colours, textures and shapes of fungi all emerging inside. Wed extracted enough DNA that the freezer, stuffed full of tubes, threatened to revolt.

Finally the time had come for me to analyse all the data, and discover just what wed managed to find after all these months of work. In the first study of its kind, to our knowledge, in a major seed bank, we found hundreds of fungi hidden inside seeds from the Millennium Seed Bank, some of which are likely to be species new to science and could be crucial for the future of plant health.

I cant remember the moment when I first decided to study fungi. If only I had an anecdote about my time as a biology undergraduate looking down the microscope at some spores for the first time, overcome by their sheer majesty but that would be fiction. For one thing, fungi barely appeared in my degree, and when they did it was usually in the negative context of causing disease.

Given that fungi are a whole kingdom of species which, alongside animals and plants, belong to the major domain of planet Earths multicellular life together called the eukaryotes, this is perhaps surprising. Yet this is the typical experience in both school and higher education (in the UK and the US at least) and, unsurprisingly, when you dont teach students about fungi, they dont go on to study fungi. Which leads to fewer researchers studying fungi that can teach students about fungi and you get the picture.

I really cant emphasise enough how much of an oversight this is. The latest estimate of the total number of fungal species is 6.2 million. To put that in context, that would mean our planet is inhabited by 15 times more fungi than plants. Other recent estimates for fungal diversity have ranged widely from 2.2 million to 165 million species but no matter which you go with, the numbers are all far greater than the 150,000 fungi which scientists have already found and described.

Weve barely scratched the surface, and I mean that quite literally countless fungi will be underground and inside other organisms. These microscopic fungi, or more simply microfungi, are invisible to the naked eye, and so for a long time have remained under the radar. But that doesnt mean theyre unimportant. Quite the opposite.

Yes, some will be pathogens, which can cause disease in plants and animals. These tend to be the fungi that get the most attention, both in terms of public awareness and scientific research, and not without some good reason. With our increased global travel and trade, not to mention our contributions to climate change, were creating a perfect opportunity for new fungal pathogens to emerge and thrive.

But theres so much more than just the pathogens. There are also the recyclers (saprotrophs), which break down organic matter and return nutrients to the soil in the continuous cycle of life and death. We live on a planet of finite resources, so its thanks to these little fungi doing the work to recycle them that our natural world can exist at all.

Countless fungi play key roles in modern society: they can be a source of medicines such as antibiotics and immunosuppressants, industrial enzymes for detergents and manufacturing and new biomaterials to replace plastics. Even the humble bakers yeast, which underpins our everyday food and drink, can be used in the lab to study human genetics or modified to produce important compounds. And these are just the fungi we already know about imagine the useful properties awaiting discovery in the fungi we are yet to find.

And maybe most famously there are the symbiotic partners known as mycorrhizal fungi, which form a relationship with plant roots, usually for mutual benefit: they can help the plant take up water and nutrients in return for carbohydrates. These fungi can form vast underground networks of nutrient exchange between plants, popularly known as the wood wide web. As if that wasnt enough, mycorrhizal fungi also help to increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil, and so play an important role in regulating global climate.

Which brings me to the fungi I study. Mycorrhizal fungi arent the only ones to be found when we look at plants. All plant tissues contain fungi, in much the same way that us animals have an array of microorganisms living inside us: our microbiome. These microfungi of plants are called fungal endophytes (endo=in, phyte=plant), and are defined by the fact that they live inside plants without causing any visible symptoms of disease.

The sequencing revolution, which has enabled us to detect otherwise imperceptible organisms from mere traces of their DNA, has transformed our awareness of these microscopic fungi. A single plant individual is capable of hosting countless different fungal species.

As always, however, its not all that simple. When we find fungal endophytes inside healthy plants, some may be latent decomposers or pathogens in other words, they are in a dormant state, waiting for the plant to die so that they can decay it, or for an opportunity to cause disease. At the same time, there are other fungal endophytes which we know can actually help their plant host, for instance by improving germination and seedling growth. What we call the endophyte lifestyle is really more of a spectrum of interactions between plants and fungi, with both good and bad consequences for plant health.

It was these fungi, with all their mystery and potential, that captured my interest. Against the odds I did find my way to studying fungi, which started in earnest when I was lucky enough to get an undergraduate sandwich year placement at Londons Royal Botanic Gardens Kew with a senior scientist of fungal research, Ester Gaya. Im still based there today, almost seven years later.

And then there is the Millennium Seed Bank, which is also part of Kew. If anything, the term seed bank probably conjures up an image of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: a vast concrete monolith emerging out of the Arctic snow like some sort of super-villain base.

The Millennium Seed Bank, nestled in the grounds of Wakehurst Place in the UK countryside, is rather less imposing to look at, but perhaps even more impressive inside. Coordinated by Kew, the seed bank is both a physical building the largest seed bank in the world with over 2.3 billion seeds from almost 40,000 species as well as a global partnership dedicated to the collection and conservation of seeds worldwide.

Seed banks are just what they sound like a place to store seeds long-term as insurance against potential crises. And crisis is on the horizon: thanks to climate change and our unsustainable use of the planet, two in five plants are estimated to be threatened with extinction. The mission of the Millennium Seed Bank is to find and preserve seeds of wild plants before theyre lost for good.

Seed banking is not just a backup for a hypothetical future scenario, as collections can already be put to good use collecting seeds from different native communities, for instance, will be crucial for ecosystem recovery after wildfires and for successful reforestation.

A fungal perspective puts a whole new spin on the idea of seed banking. It may not have been the primary goal, but in the process of preserving plant diversity, seed banks are also preserving the fungal diversity inside seeds. Of course, scientists working in seed banking have been aware of fungi before now, but the context has been decidedly negative. The banking standards from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations always refer to fungi as a contamination, a problem to be removed, and actually recommend use of fungicides to kill any fungi present.

This approach is rooted in reason, as many fungi can and will cause disease in plants, and a seed bank needs to avoid becoming a vector for plant diseases. But were increasingly realising that the microorganisms in and around us influence the world far more than previously understood. As humans, altering the balance of microorganisms in our gut can have all sorts of negative health consequences and has even been connected to neurological disease. We know less about the microbiome of plants, but this will need to change if we are to successfully protect all the species at risk of extinction.

The idea that the Millennium Seed Bank must surely be full of these potentially helpful microfungi we call endophytes inside its seeds would not be a stretch to anybody who studies fungi or microbiology, and yet no one had ever looked before. This changed a few years ago, when Gaya first started to consider the question. But where to start, in such an enormous collection of seeds?

Our opportunity came thanks to a fellow PhD student, Simon Kallow, who studies how to store the seeds of banana wild relatives long-term for conservation. As the name suggests, crop wild relatives are the close relatives of our cultivated crops. Theyre interesting to scientists as theyre far more genetically diverse and so can provide a source of useful traits to breed into our crops, for instance to make them more resilient to climate change, pests or disease.

Theres another idea that the microbiome of wild relatives could also have a role to play in protecting our crops: that we can potentially introduce endophytes from wild relatives into crops to pass on useful properties, such as stress tolerance. Protecting wild relatives, and their microbiomes, can be seen as a safeguard for the future of the crops we all rely on for food.

This is particularly relevant for bananas, which are not only an important cash crop worth US$31 billion a year but also a significant part of peoples diets in the regions where they grow. In an unfortunate case of history repeating itself, global banana crops are currently threatened by a fungal pathogen strain called Foc TR4, and so its doubly important to conserve their wild relatives.

Kallow was interested in what fungal endophytes might be inside his wild banana seeds, and if they could be playing a role in how well the seeds survived storage and went on to germinate. It was the perfect chance for us to have a first look at what fungi might be hidden inside the Millennium Seed Bank collections.

We used two approaches we crushed up seeds and sequenced any fungal DNA from inside, but we also tried to grow the fungi from inside seeds, known as culturing. That way, we captured as much of the diversity that was present as possible but also built a collection of living fungal endophyte cultures that we can use in the future.

The reality of working with organisms that are too small to see can be a little anticlimactic a lot of the time youre just looking at tiny amounts of colourless liquid in tubes.

In looking at just six plant species, we were able to find almost 200 fungal species. Extrapolate up to the Millennium Seed Banks 40,000 plant species and even if assuming there is some overlap of fungal endophytes between different plant species you can end up with a heady estimate of fungal diversity hidden in their collections, potentially reaching over a million species, some of which are likely new species to science.

Mining that diversity is intrinsically interesting in terms of studying the fungi themselves, but these are also species that may be important to the health of the plants they inhabit, and therefore crucial to the objectives of seed banking at large.

As we were able to grow some fungal endophytes in culture, we know that at least some species (mostly the very common ones) can survive the Millennium Seed Banks protocol of processing, drying and freezing seeds. There were other endophytes that we detected from sequencing their DNA, but which didnt grow in culture but these werent necessarily dead, as many fungi are more sensitive and dont grow readily in the lab. In the future we will need to figure out the true extent of endophytes surviving the storage process in case there are important, rare species that are lost.

Our results support previous studies which suggest that fungi are usually mutually exclusive inside seeds. In other words, in most cases where we detected fungi inside the seeds, we only found a single species, suggesting that in the limited space of the seed one fungal species can often dominate and outcompete any others.

This raises an interesting question as to whether we can use this phenomenon to protect our plants from pathogens: if we can inoculate a plant with the right fungal endophyte, could it outcompete fungal pathogens that try to infect the seed? This idea needs to be tested in experiments, but its one example of why there is hope that we can use endophytes for a natural form of plant disease control.

We also found that the total number of fungal endophytes present in each set of seeds, as well as the specific combination of species, changed depending on the habitat that the seeds were collected from. This means that when researchers are working in the field, where they choose to collect seeds from can have unforeseen consequences on what microbiome will be preserved.

The proportion of seeds which were alive or germinated after storage also changed depending on habitat. Hopefully future experiments can confirm if the fungi themselves are contributing to this pattern. This is why its so valuable to have preserved living fungal cultures, as it allows us to use them in experiments to test many of these questions.

As is so often the case in science, we emerged from this study with more questions than answers. But some of these questions, which have consequences for the way we protect seeds for the future, have never been researched before at the Millennium Seed Bank. Are we managing to preserve enough of the seed microbiome? How much will that matter for the plants health?

And then there are the questions about the fungi themselves what can we learn from this previously unexplored gold mine of fungal diversity?

To rise to the challenge, in the first instance, we need to ensure people have the opportunity to learn about them a different experience from what I had, barely hearing about fungi in university, and not at all at school.

In the summer of 2019 I helped to run the fungi stall at Kews Science Festival, an annual public event where visitors are invited to take part in activities and talk to scientists about why plants and fungi are so important to our lives. I will always remember the wide-eyed looks as I explained that the biggest organism in the world is actually a 400-tonne, 2,500 year old humongous fungus, or that some mushrooms glow in the dark to attract insects.

Fungi are strange and cool and interesting enough that really all you have to do is share them and fascination will follow. Children and adults alike would approach our stall knowing almost nothing about fungi, but by the end of the weekend, fungi were among the top mentions of what visitors enjoyed most at the festival.

You can find amazing things once your eyes are opened to this weird and wonderful kingdom.

This article was originally publishedin the Conversation on 22 March 2021.

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SE - How we discovered a hidden world of fungi inside the world's biggest seed bank - QMUL