Alex Shingleton, Assistant Professor of Zoology
Evolution has traditionally been taught in classroom lectures, but Professor Alex Shingleton has created a new lab to make studying evolution a truly hands-on experience for students in ZOL 445L.
“The goal of the lab is to take evolution out of the lecture hall and bring it into the real world,” Shingleton said. “In the lab, students do practical evolutionary research, much like the evolutionary research I did as a Ph.D. student and the kind of experimental evolutionary research Rich Lenski does in his lab.”
One of the experiments the class conducts is to replicate one of Lenski’s early evolution experiments with bacteria. The students grow two strains of E. coli in equal sized populations in a shared low glucose environment. Over ten weeks, the bacteria go through 460 generations and one of the strains mutates to better survive in the environment. The strain then begins to out-compete the other strain of bacteria, and the initial 50:50 ratio changes.
“Students can track evolution as it happens in the lab because they can see these ratios change from week to week to week,” Shingleton said. “It is one of the few experiments where you can see evolution as it happens.
Teaching evolution in a laboratory also educates students about many basic biological laboratory techniques used by evolutionary biologists, including bacteriology, PCR, sequence analysis, sequencing, phylogenetic analysis, primer design and database searching.
“The emphasis is really on the students developing hypotheses and experiments to test those hypotheses,” Shingleton said. “They design the experiments, collect the data and analyze the data.”
Shingleton feels that embedding evolutionary biology in the scientific method provides the students with a solid education. One student stated in his course evaluation that the class “was intellectually stimulating, challenging and entertaining.” The new evolutionary lab will be offered again in fall 2009.
Providing Undergrads Primary Research Experience
Professor Alex Shingleton has developed the Program for Undergraduate Research in Life-Sciences, or PURL, which gives students mentored experience in life-science research. The program begins with a seminar for first-year students and provides opportunities to visit working labs and research institutions. The next year, students begin half-semester rotations working in different participating labs. For the final two years, students are hired as research interns in laboratories.
“These experiences prepare students for entry into graduate school and makes them very competitive,” Shingleton said. “It is like the beginning of many graduate programs, yet for undergraduates it allows them to explore different options while working on a bachelors degree.”
Written by Michael Steger. Originally published in the Dept. of Zoology Alumni Newsletter, March 2009.
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