The HaloEd Project A web site dedicated to biotechnology education
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Introduction	Co-teaching It is important for educators to be able to link what they are doing in their classrooms with that of their colleagues. Co-teaching is important, and Halobacteria can be tied into almost any subject as can be seen in the following list: 1. Biotechnology and Medicine: • development of orally administered vaccines • design of new antibiotics 2. Math: Dilutions, exponential growth curves 3. History: – historical relevance of salt http://www.saltinstitute.org/3.html The early Chinese used coins made of salt and in Europe many Mediterranean people used cakes of salt as currency. Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt. The word "salary" comes from "sal," the Latin word for salt. • The main sources of salt in ancient times were dry coastal areas near the Mediterranean. Early trade routes centered on Spain, Italy, Greece and Egypt. Many of the caravan trade routes were developed to transport salt, and Genoa, Pisa and Venice emerged as centers for the salt trade. • Throughout history, salt has been bartered and taxed. Wars have been fought over it, and lost because of a lack of it. According to some historians, Napoleon retreated from Russian partly because he lacked salt for his troops and horses. • Colonial America got most of its salt from England and with the onset of the Revolutionary War Benjamin Franklin made a secret deal with Bermuda to supply salt to the American forces. • In 1783, after the war had been won, salt works were set up along the Atlantic Coast. Major salt deposits found near Syracuse provided one of the main reasons for the construction of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825. 4. Ecology: · hypersaline environments · niche · effects of fertilizer overuse and of drying of seas – resulting in salty deserts – tie in to biotechnological adaptation of agricultural crops to new environments by acquisition of salt tolerance genes 5. Geography: • It has been estimated that West Virginia has enough salt resources to supply the nation's needs for 2,000 years. http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/geology/geolmrsa.htm • It has been estimated that salt deposits under the state of Kansas alone could supply the entire world's salt needs for the next 250,000 years. • Some estimates suggest that there is enough salt in the Metro Detroit underground to last 70 million years. • Salt is used in some 14,000 commercial applications 6. Art: e.g. “Salt Piece”: by Jorg Lenzlinger and “ecoart” such as “Spiral Jetty” by Robert Smithson. 7. Literature: e.g. The Fifth Man by John B. Olson & Randall Ingermanson, where “Things get knocked out of whack when Valkerie and Alexis discover halobacteria—filmy pink layers in a salt compound of Martian DNA -- the discovery of life on another planet. “ “A Door into Ocean” by Joan Slonczewski, where some characters live thanks to symbiotic microbes with purple membrane membranes (a colleague at MIT mentioned the Halobacterial purple membrane, inspiring the author to write them into her Sci-Fi novel): “violet, from the symbiont microbes that stored oxygen”.
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Role in food chain
Motility
Radiation resistance
Cellular energetics
Physiology
Genome sequence
Bioinformatics
Biotechnology
Patents
Lesson plans
Co-teaching hints
Molgent
FAQ
Further reading
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