One hundred and fifty five high school teachers and 5,500 students in New Jersey learn how to extract DNA from worm specimens and access bioinformatics resources online to analyze the DNA sequences and submit their results to an international database.

Bioinformatics: the Rutgers Initiative in Teacher Enhancement (BRITE) is an NSF ITEST Comprehensive Project that involves teachers and their students. BRITE invites high school teachers to participate in, and contribute to, a series of scientific "Challenges" posted over the World Wide Web, the answers to which require using the computational tools of molecular biology, structural biology, and bioinformatics. Over the period of the grant, BRITE will work closely with teachers participating in a Local Project and remotely with teachers who participate in a Regional Project. As a result of their involvement, teachers will strengthen their existing curricula with the tools and resources of information technology. Several thousands of high school students will benefit from their teachers' work in the Local and Regional Projects.