This project was inspired by over ten years of working with teachers and students on DNA Barcoding. I was fortunate enough to be a teacher fellow in Cold Spring Harbor's Barcode Long Island. I helped train Long Island teachers and mentor students across Long Island as they developed and completed their projects. As we got better with our DNA Barcode projects, the student questions got better as well, but in many cases we were unable to go deeper in our quest for answers.

I work on a special Island with variable ecosystems in close proximity to each other giving us the ability to examine plants, their microbiomes in different ecosystems very close to our school. Now we are hoping to take it to the next level so students can ask and answer more in depth DNA barcode and plant microbiome questions using nanopore DNA sequencing in the classroom!