The Wild Yeast Biodiversity Project is an inquiry-based module developed for Molecular Methods in Evolution and Ecology, an upper-division biology lab class at the University of California, San Diego. It serves as one of three major projects that student complete over the course of the 10-week class. In the project, students work to isolate strains of wild yeast from the chaparral at a local nature reserve. They take field samples, culture the samples to isolate individual strains of yeast, and identify the strains using DNA barcoding.
The project has 4 goals:
1) Guide students through an authentic process of scientific discovery in which they collect novel data and contribute to our understanding of microbial diversity and ecology.
2) Teach students scientific skills: field collecting, microbiology culturing, molecular biology techniques, basic bioinformatics skills, microbiology safety, and aseptic technique.
3) Build a living archive of the fungal diversity at the Scripps Coastal Reserve.
4) Discover and document new species of wild yeasts, in collaboration with the Hittinger Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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