MATTER Magazine Spotlight: BIO 670 Biology Research

By Daniel Chen ‘27, Ella Fang ‘27, Ahmed Hamad ‘27, Aaron Spence ‘27, and Andrew Yang ‘27

Every spring term at Exeter, Exonians who share a passion for biology may apply to take the BIO670 course, titled “Biology Research.” This course allows students to explore various topics in biology by researching fruit flies, aiming to develop new techniques to be used in Dr. Seung Kim’s lab at Stanford University.

This course is almost entirely student-led and students learn material through hands-on experiments. BIO670 has been one of the most successful advanced biology courses in the Exeter science curriculum, with slight modifications to its course content every year.

Instructor in Science Anne Rankin described the course: “[The students] are following a protocol, which is a crossing program for multiple generations of fruit flies, and then some characterizations of the novel type of fruit fly that they’re making,” Rankin said.

“Then that thing that they’re making is actually a tool for another researcher,” Rankin continued. “It goes into a repository of all these different kinds of fruit flies called the Bloomington Stock Center. Then, all those types of fruit flies are listed for researchers and they can order and buy the particular tool they need to carry out the experiment that they’re doing.”

Instructor in Science Townley Chisholm added, “We teach the elegant logic of crossing protocols that use chromosomes with dominant markers to trace the inheritance of P element transposons we want to place in novel locations in stable stocks of flies.”

Chisholm continued to describe how students were taught to “identify with inverse PCR exactly where our P elements landed in the fly genome and how to dissect and take images under UV light to show where and when those P elements (and their nearby genes) are being expressed,” Chisholm said.

In terms of how the course has changed over the years, Chisholm shared, “Every year or two, Dr. Kim’s lab suggests a new variation of the course. We used CRISPR to swap one driver for another for the last 2 years.

“This year we had a really fun crossing program that uses female flies with 2 fused X chromosomes and a Y, and, yes, they are still female even with that Y. How it will change in the future is completely unpredictable,” Chisholm commented.

Current and past students of the course shared fond experiences in the course. Jenna Wang ‘24 shared: “BIO670 is a really unique course to the school because it allows us to implement research techniques and learn about them and do actual research that’s used in the real world instead of learning about things.”

For Sylvia Langer ‘24, “the small class size of six to seven also appealed to me,” Langer said. “I really liked having a class of two teachers and six students per class because I think it brought really interesting discussions and it was way more intimate and way more community-driven, which I really appreciated.”

Advika Verma ‘25 shared what the class is currently working on: “A lot of what we’re doing right now is taking care of the flies and setting up new crosses for each generation. It’s a lot of fly maintenance. We learned a lot about the Drosophila [fruit fly] genome. We’re learning about how many chromosomes they have, what genes there are, what chromosomes, and how we can manipulate that for the purpose of this class.”

Verma continued to describe, “Something that was really interesting to me was the whole research aspect of it and more hands-on lab work that we worked on in the winter.”

Another anecdote was shared by Stella Song ‘25, who remarked on the course’s unpredictable nature. “My favorite moment so far is when I found my H male fly,” Song said.

“It is very rare due to the low chances of the genetic events that need to occur to produce this fly and I couldn’t find any for a few weeks,” Song continued. “As much as I loved finally finding one, the waiting period is perhaps more important for me because it reflects the uncertainty and adventurous nature of research that you cannot get from classroom learning.”

Similar to the students of this course, Rankin reflected on her experience teaching BIO670. She described, “The thing that is really fun to me about BIO670 is that though Mr. Chisholm and I know a lot of what’s going on. It’s really fun to figure things out with students. It’s really fun to recognize when the students either ask a question or they make an observation that uncovers something that I don’t understand. Kids do ask questions that you don’t know the answer to, but it doesn’t happen quite as often.”

Rankin continued, “In BIO670, you’re getting kids who love biology and who’ve learned a lot of biology, so often when they ask you a question it’s like, ‘Ooh, yeah, I really need to figure that out.’ And I just love that moment of learning side by side with a student.”

“We’re all in the room doing this stuff together, but each student is responsible for their own sets of crosses. I think there’s something to be proud of in this class. Later in the term, they’ll learn how to dissect fruit fly larvae and take photographs of them and then also learn the molecular biology they need to characterize what they’ve created,” Rankin added.

During the course, students and teachers have also faced challenges that helped them hone their collaboration skills and broaden their knowledge. “I think it’s definitely been very difficult to go from a traditional harvest science class to one that’s more lab-oriented… It’s [also] a smaller class, it’s six people compared to your traditional twelve, so I think for me personally, there’s been more pressure to step up and participate.” Verma said.

Additionally, “This class is a giant time commitment,” Verma continued, “A lot of times we meet during E [format] so there’s universal free time after, and a lot of us will stay for 20 to 30 minutes to look at our flies. We’ve had to come in on weekends, Friday nights, in the evenings, or Monday nights sometimes to clean bottles or check on our flies.”

Verma described another challenging aspect of the course as a student “generally never having learned anything about fruit flies before to kind of just getting right into it on the first day.”

Moreover, Stella Song ‘25 commented on the difficult lab techniques involved in this course. “For me, the foremost challenge so far is to maintain vigorous generations of flies so that I have ample offspring to sort through to increase my chances of finding flies with desired phenotypes. Gaining more practice on Drosophila research has helped me improve my lab techniques,” Song shared.

Potjer added another challenge of the course, namely “dissecting really small, fruit flies.” Potjer detailed how the dissection process “was an extremely difficult task and it took four weeks or so just to successfully dissect some flies. It was an extreme challenge, and at the beginning, I never thought that I would be able to successfully do that.” 

Chisholm also commented on the students’ progress and perseverance throughout this course. “We are all learning together and making mistakes together and doing things over together to get them right. The course has a very strong team spirit that derives from spending lots of time together sorting flies, cleaning bottles, working through DNA extraction protocols, and taking fluorescent images of glowing fly larvae. We never know what we are going to find or figure out.”

Almost all current and prior students recommend future Exonians to tackle this course. For Verma, BIO670 was her favorite class here at Exeter.

Potjer agreed, sharing: “This is an extremely unique class and one of the opportunities that’s very unique to Exeter. And so I think it’s a really special learning experience and it’s a really fun opportunity to work with teachers in a very small environment and really contribute to something actively.” 

Adding on to the uniqueness of this experience, Langer said, “I think one of the great things about coming to Exeter is being able to experience such intimate class settings. I think the fact that we’re able to also work with such an accomplished and distinguished lab and produce real data is something that’s really unique.” 

“There are so many lessons and moments of collaboration that you would not normally get in a classroom setting,” Song agreed.

Verma provided insights on pre-recommendations for taking this course. “I think if you’re especially passionate about lab work and you are excited to go in and learn new things and do something new that you’ve never really done before, it’s really exciting. It does require a lot of discipline and perseverance to get over the initial humps.” 

Rankin shared that BIO670 is not the course for every student. “You can be an amazing science student and think that’s not the experience I want right now. And there’s no problem with that. But for some kids it’s a really fun experience,” Rankin said.

Nevertheless, both students and instructors of the course agreed that BIO670 was able to provide students with valuable research and laboratory knowledge to pursue their future studies.