Get thee to a gene-ery

Sister Mary Jane Paolella blames herself. Two bands on her gel were running awfully close together, and she must have cut out the wrong one. Thus the sequence her girls got for the putative bovine vitamin D receptor gene (VDR) only matched microbial sequences in BLAST searches. But small setbacks like that certainly don't hold back this 58-year-old nun, an Apostle of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.Despite the error, her students' poster on the basis of two other partial sequences for the collagen receptor (COL1A1) and the calictonin receptor (CALCR) was still accepted to last month's annual GSAC conference, this year in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The five high school seniors she brought with her to the J. Craig Venter Institute-sponsored meeting – it was her seventh such conference – shared not only the sequencing sister's love of genomics, but her grace. "Thank you for taking the time to listen to us," blushed Megan Triechel, a senior at Sacred Heart Academy in Hamden, Conn., after she and several collaborators presented their sequence of the genes associated with osteoporosis from Bos taurus, the domestic cow.Sr. Mary Jane has been teaching high school biology for 30 years, and she caught the genomics bug about a decade ago. After hearing about a University of Washington, Seattle, program that taught sequencing to high school students, she called to find out how to do the same. UW's Maureen Munn asked about the sister's situation. The all-girls Catholic school just happened to be close to Munn's postdoctoral advisor, Wesley Bonds, then at Yale. Bonds called her that day and a year later he and Sr. Mary Jane were presenting student work at GSAC. The presentation was so good, meeting organizers asked her back – with her students.Bioscience has flourished at Sacred Heart as a result. Applied Biosystems, used to seeing the tiny Sr. Mary Jane shepherding her cherubic collaborators around the exhibit hall, arranged to donate a sequencer. "It's an ABI Prism 310 genetic analyzer. That's a single capillary sequencer," says the sister proudly. She's also tracked down funding. The Bates Foundation gave the science department a $20,000 grant for an ongoing school-wide study of osteoporosis. It was a chance, says Sr. Mary Jane, for the girls to invest in their health.Every grade does their part, and juniors and seniors in Sr. Mary Jane's class got to perform sequencing on several cow genes associated with the condition (S.M.J. Paolella et al., "Using Bos taurus to sequence osteoporosis genes: COL101, CALCR, and VDR," Poster 22: Genomes Medicine and the Environment Conference 2005.) They chose Bossie for safety reasons. Calf thymus from the local Stop&Shop grocery story is safer for the girls to handle than human samples. The United States Department of Agricultural even provided DNA from Dominette, the cow being used in the Bovine Sequencing Project.In addition to getting their names in GenBank – see entries DQ114140 and DQ114141 – the girls got a serious boost of confidence from the attention given them by high-profile scientists at the meeting. Current Sacred Heart senior Aislinn Hinkley said it was gratifying how everyone asked them to present and offered them advice.And it's a lesson that sticks with some students. Amy Vashlishan got to attend the GSAC conference in Miami in 1998, just as the race to complete the human genome was beginning to heat up. Now a PhD candidate in genetics at Harvard Medical School, she says the experience definitely channeled her interests into science. JoMichell Corrales, a postdoc studying developmental genetics at Yale was inspired enough by the Sister's influence that she went on to mentor high school girls herself while working towards her PhD. "If you can influence women at a younger age, I think that takes them pretty far."

Get thee to a gene-ery

Sister Mary Jane Paolella blames herself.

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