C. Elegans as a Teaching and Research Material for High School Biology Teachers

Caenorhabditis elegans has became a model organism for studying animal behavior, developmental and cell biology since 1970 because it is small and has a short-life cycle for very easy to handle and grow. In the past decade, three groups of worm researchers were awarded by Nobel Prize, two groups for Medicine and Physiology and one for Chemistry. This leads worms become a popular teaching material for high school students in USA and other advanced countries. In Taiwan, it is used to use Drosophila for genetic experiment. However, C. elegans has more advantages than Drosophila for high school experimental materials, because it is easy to culture and obverse. Furthermore, it won’t fly and can be easily kept in a Petri-dish. It can be a simple material for teaching high school students to understand how Mendel’s law works in sex determination in worms. C. elegans has tow sexes, hermaphrodites (XX) and male (XO). In nature, hermaphrodites can self-fertilize and the offspring are in a high percentage of hermaphrodites (XX) and 0.1% of male (XO) due to a non-disjunction of X chromosomes which has been taught in high school. So after students having counted the sex ratio of offspring from hermaphrodite-selfing and mating with males, they will deduce the Mendel segregation law. In the last three years, I was supported by a grant of REST from the Department of Science Education, NSC. I established a website for “worm and popular science” and taught more than 50 high school biology teachers and 100 high school students. Based on the past experience, I propose to continue a two-year project to enhance the worm experiments for high school genetics. In addition to maintaining the website, teaching high school biology teachers from 10 schools and conducting workshop for 100 high school students in C. elegans from 4 schools, I’ll design two biology experiments for high school students and prepare 4000 worm slides for 20 high schools to test the new teaching material of genetics.

Project ID:PF10008-0756
External Project ID:NSC100-2511-S182-001