Summary
Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks standardized lab teaching processes on the JoVE streaming video platform, preserving the team's internal expertise, as well as eliminating months of training and the expenditure of thousands of dollars for supplies.
Challenge
Dr. Kelly Drew’s lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks focuses on researching the biology of hibernation. As with other academic research organizations, the Drew lab’s research suffered from high student turnover rates. Staff members performing specific experiments would graduate, and take precious protocol know-how with them. “A few years later, someone wants to do that experiment again, but the instructor is gone,” says Jeanette Moore, a researcher and manager at the Drew lab.
Bringing new researchers onboard the Drew lab required a half-year of training. It also cost thousands of dollars in the lab supplies expended in trial and error-based teaching processes.
Solution
Wanting to preserve the hard-won knowledge gained within the Drew lab, staff started watching JoVE video articles. Because JoVE offers lab protocol visualization, it can boost teaching capabilities over text-only based educational methods. And as JoVE articles are streamed over the web, these peer-reviewed scientific articles can be studied anytime, anywhere. This enables research facilities to easily access concise and consistent visualization training.
Results
Overall, using JoVE helped preserve knowledge in the lab, despite the typical student class rotations. And it allowed researchers to successfully replicate projects that had originally been done years before.
Among the various benefits:
- Lab learning timelines dropped from six months to just a few days
- Improved learning allowed staff at Drew lab to use fewer antibodies, and saved thousands of dollars on costly lab reagents (cFos, GAD67, and tyrosine hydroxylase, among others)
- The lab also required fewer lab animal demonstrations to teach new researchers
- JoVE-enabled research results helped the lab secure three new grants
As Moore notes: “Instead of trying to learn a technique from the literature for six months, new researchers can master the method in a few days. As such, everything is streamlined with JoVE.”
The Drew lab staff also published an article on the JoVE website, titled “Growth and Differentiation of Adult Hippocampal Arctic Ground Squirrel Neural Stem Cells.”