Last updated April 20, 2011
On Friday, April 15 students at Wheeling Park High School arrived at school to see the PITT logo plastered across a large tractor-trailer parked outside their school. This enormous truck is the Mobile Lab sponsored by the University Of Pittsburgh Department Of Biological Sciences, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the National Center for Research Resources Scientific Education Partnership Award, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Mobile Lab is a self contained, traveling laboratory that allows students to use current, high-end equipment to perform many laboratory investigations.
Through collaborations with HSTA, the Mobile Lab made it's West Virginia debut serving over 100 students on its Friday and Saturday visit to Wheeling Park High School. Students role played as a team of population geneticists that were being sent to Eastern Africa to screen a population of individuals for the presence of the sickle cell trait. They were able to analyze the banding patterns of DNA samples from a population to determine the number of individuals with sickle cell disease, those with the sickle cell trait, and those with normal hemoglobin genes.