This course is designed to provide students with foundational and technical skills required to work in a testing or research laboratory setting as a technician, using pathogen detection (and our wastewater surveillance testing lab) as an exemplar of the application of these skills. For natural science majors in the biology/chemistry fields, such positions are frequently the first jobs students enter after graduation, and often serve as a gateway to professional careers in STEM fields. Students will learn lab skills and foundational molecular biology techniques, building up to molecular diagnostic techniques via Reverse Transcription - quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR), the technical workflow we use in wastewater surveillance testing.
The course is a combination of background principles, which will be literature and information based, and lab skills, which will be executed and practiced in the lab. Each week, background material will be posted on the course Blackboard website and needs to be completed before coming to the lab on Fridays. Quizzes will be utilized to assess learning outcomes in each of the modules, and skills assessment will be used to gauge technical proficiency. The didactic (content) portion will be through Blackboard; the lab skills portion will be in-place. Thus, this laboratory course can be considered as “hybrid”.
What will I learn in this course?
- Lab Safety
- Solution preparation skills
- Basic micropipetting skills
- Aseptic technique and BSL-2 maintenance
- Automated and manual biologic concentration for downstream analysis
- Automated and manual nucleic acid extraction and isolation
- Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR, incl. RT-qPCR)
- The basics of other pathogen detection modalities like rapid tests and ELISAs
- Construction of workflows and assay trouble-shooting
- Operation of common laboratory equipment
- The principles and components of experimental lab research and design, including variables, appropriate controls, standards, quantitative analysis, and maintenance of a laboratory notebook (record-keeping and organization)
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Dr. Barrie Bode grew up in a diverse working class neighborhood in Ferguson, MO (a near-north suburb of St Louis), went to public schools, and worked summer jobs (landscaping, restaurants, gas stations, life guard, construction) since age 14. He majored in Biology at Saint Louis University, and his first job after graduation was as a laboratory technician in an industrial lab, which he worked for two years while taking night courses in biochemistry. He went to graduate school and as a young parent earned his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He did his postdoctoral research in the Liver Biology labs in the Health Sciences Division of Monsanto back in his hometown of St. Louis. From there, was recruited to Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston to help establish and run the Surgical Oncology Research Laboratories, launched his academic career into the molecular physiological underpinnings of liver cancer – and taught surgical residents the principles and techniques of translational biomedical research. In 1999, he returned to Saint Louis University where he ran his NIH-funded lab in amino acid transport and cancer, taught multiple courses in molecular and cellular biology and human physiology, and was a member of the SLU Liver Center and Cancer Center in the Saint Louis University Medical Center. In 2009, he came to NIU as the new department chair of Biological Sciences – and held that position until the fall of 2020, when he was appointed to run the COVID-19 testing program on campus during the pandemic. In January of 2021, he established the wastewater surveillance testing program in collaboration with the Kishwaukee Water Reclamation District, and recruited Syed Hyder to help launch and run the wastewater testing laboratory. The program has been running for three years, and the evolving dashboard reporting virus levels has been in place since the spring of 2021. Beginning in the summer of 2023, Dr. Bode was appointed as the interim Associate VP for Research to help run the research enterprise on the NIU campus under new VPR, Dr. Yvonne Harris – also an NIU alumnus.
ABOUT THE COURSE
This lab course was made possible through a grant from SHIELD Illinois, who ran the saliva based SARS-CoV-2 rapid qPCR testing program in the state – including the NIU campus – during the pandemic. Molecular testing training is very expensive, so an external grant was required to create this course.
Back-story: As SHIELD-Illinois staffed their testing labs, it quickly became evident that there were not enough trained laboratory personnel to keep pace, and there was a need to look at workforce development beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, our mission at NIU is to teach and train students for careers beyond academics. This course was therefore borne out of an intersection between mission and regional workforce needs. SHIELD Illinois likewise converted their testing labs in Chicago to partially engage in workforce development – led by NIU (and Bode lab) alumnus Natalie Lubbers – via the creation of the Clinical Laboratory Development Program (CLDP). The CLDP, based at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) incubator space, is a more comprehensive program than this course, but the two closely align – and we work with the CLDP to inform curricular development. This course is the first iteration of this funded collaboration between the University of Illinois and NIU.
