Academic Enrichment Grant 2024-2025 Project Summary

Jason Econome

Stuyvesant High School • Garden City, NY

The project “Be the Healthy-Yeast (Healthiest) You Can Be!” investigates the mechanics of gene expression, the process a cell implements to make needed proteins from the information encoded in its genome. Yeast will be employed because it is an easy-to-handle eukaryote that shares many proteins and metabolic processes with those of humans. This project offers concrete and engaging ways for students with a full range of aptitudes to learn at their own pace and capacity. It allows them to start making connections between the nutrients and other environmental metrics needed for functioning and growing microbes, with what their own bodies require to be healthy, productive and happy on a daily basis. Students will learn not only how proteins are made, but how this two-stage pathway is influenced through the cell’s dynamic interaction with the surrounding environment.  The model for this project allows students to learn on a first-hand basis, as opposed to acquiring generic information from a textbook or the internet, as they will design their own experiments, collect and track their own data.  Students will learn fundamental laboratory skills and develop problem-solving skills as  they conduct experiments and apply their findings to the next experiment.  “Be the Healthy-Yeast (Healthiest) You Can Be!” will be implemented in the spring Biology course at Stuyvesant High School.  It will be a required research project culminating in a comprehensive report that will detail equipment used, data analysis, reflections of the students’ experience and projections of future experiments.

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