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Building a Distributed Research Network for Undergraduate Opportunities in Molecular Biochemistry

The COVID‐19 pandemic brought to light the continued issues in access to research opportunities. Many of our undergraduate students at research‐intensive institutes lost their ability to go into labs to gain experience. However, students at most smaller colleges and universities faced these challenges to bring research opportunities to students long before the pandemic. Thus, our lower‐cost community colleges and higher education institutes with diverse students lack equity when it comes to research investments. This highlights the need for bringing research into diverse institutes using novel approaches. Over the past ten years, our team has built a strategy for integrating genomic and molecular bioinformatics tools into undergraduate opportunities. Developing bioinformatics training material, professor training opportunities, summer research opportunities, and organized large scale research projects, our team has developed a distributed research network. Our goal is to bring genomic and bioinformatic literacy to early undergraduate training to increase STEM retention while improving research equity issues. Having students work on characterizing challenging clinical variants, known as Variants of Uncertain Significance (VUS), brings novel research projects to students while filling the growing needs of clinical variant characterizations.