KU research lab provides KC high school students with unique learning experience

LAWRENCE — The Unckless Lab at the University of Kansas recently conducted a final analysis on a yearlong outreach program with Blue Valley North High School in work funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation supporting STEM education.

Robert Unckless, KU associate professor of molecular biosciences and director of the KU Center for Genomics, worked alongside Chris Ollig, Blue Valley North AP Biology teacher, to design a high school course using material from college classes.

This experience was built using material from the KU researcher's Biology 599 course and was funded through NSF grant titled “The genetic basis of divergence in immune defense between species.” 

In fall 2025, BVN students began research looking into microbial diversity in insects. Using the high school’s prairie restoration plot as a collection site, they netted insects and brought them back to the lab to homogenize them — a process which breaks the specimens down into little pieces — before plating the samples on petri dishes.

Students then attempted to isolate single microbial colonies and used microscopes to describe bacterial morphology.

“There's a lot of bacterial information that you can get from answering questions like what does it look like and what does it smell like?” Unckless said.

After performing these analyses, students extracted DNA from the bacterial colonies. Those samples were transported to the Unckless Lab at KU, where the lab sequenced small chunks of the bacterial genome to identify what bacteria the students collected. The lab then performed whole-genome sequencing on several of the bacteria.

“I loved getting to experience what felt like real science work. I felt like I got a good view of the kind of work I could do in the future,” one of the students wrote for project feedback.

Another student said they enjoyed using the KBASE website, exploring its tools and seeing the collective effort of everyone involved get summarized.

Hands-on, higher-level science experiments like this are rare in high schools due to budget restraints and material accessibility, and being able to see what doing research is like in a professional lab can inspire students’ pursuit of later careers, according to Unckless. He recalled a student saying, “We are actually like doing real science,” a sentiment that supports the need for further education and public outreach initiatives from federal programs.

This spring, BVN students continued their research, assembling and annotating the bacterial genomes. Participating students will have the opportunity to publish a paper based on this research and will present a final project poster to their class. 

In May, BVN students will have the opportunity to present their research posters at the KU Center for Genomics Symposium.

Regarding student results from the experiments, Unckless said, “It's a little bit of a cheat, but the basic idea is that the students discovered new microbes that nobody's ever seen before. Now the reason it's a cheat is that every new microbe is a microbe nobody's seen before, because it's genetically different from anything else.

“How genetically different is the question. If it's 99.9% identical, is it that interesting? Maybe not. If it's 95% identical, that's actually pretty different. Scientists at large have done a lot of sequencing, and to see something that is divergent would be pretty different. So, the idea is that the students have discovered a new microbe that is in whatever insect they're working with.”

In future years, Unckless said he hopes to expand this experience to Lawrence school system and find ways to sustain the outreach program post grant funding. 

“Talking to students, the younger the better, about the fact that there are things you can do in biology that aren't medical school is important. Not that there's anything wrong with medical school, but so many young students enjoy biology and think, ‘OK, that means I'm going to be a doctor or nurse.’ Showing students real research early on is important. It’s important that we do that in schools early and for classes that aren't only AP classrooms.

“I had a student years ago who was going to be a nurse because she loved biology and her family said, ‘Well, if you like science, you go into nursing,’ and now she's a postdoc at Johns Hopkins doing great research. At the time, she just didn't know what was open to her.”