In a cramped trailer in a side parking lot of Dorseyville Middle School, 13-year-old Tad Abramowich is engaged in a little electrophoresis.

Tad and his lab partner, Victor DeSimone, gingerly pour molten gel into a plastic mold as they prepare to test a cell for characteristics of sickle cell anemia using an electric current applied to the gel.

"We would never do stuff like this at our school," said Tad, a seventh-grader at Avonworth Middle School. "This is the real deal."

Thanks to the University of Pittsburgh and a couple of major federal grants, Tad and more than 120 other Allegheny County middle school students were able to gather yesterday in Dorseyville in the Fox Chapel Area School District to participate in "DNA Day."

The event was held to complement National DNA Day this Friday and brings together two Pitt grants from the National Institutes of Health: the Science Education Partnership Award and the Clinical and Translational Science Award.

It also comes one week before the first mandatory administration of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment science tests in grades 4, 8 and 11.

The PSSA science tests, which have been field-tested in previous years but have not been mandatory, will be aligned to Pennsylvania science standards. However, it will not be used to evaluate schools and districts under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Mimi Loeffler, a coordinator of gifted programs at Dorseyville, had organized a much smaller event for DNA Day last year. In January, she called the University of Pittsburgh for assistance and got more help than she envisioned.

"We were asked to provide a speaker, and we thought, we can do better than that," said Steven E. Reis, Pitt's associate vice chancellor for clinical research.

Pitt's biology department runs outreach programs that reach 3,000 elementary, middle and high school students per year, almost all of them in Allegheny County. The goal of the programs is to bridge the Pennsylvania state science standards with the cutting-edge research underway in the region's universities and medical centers, said Alison Slinskey Legg, director of outreach programs.

For this year's DNA Day, Ms. Loeffler pulled together the event involving 12 different schools in less than three months, aiming to provide lessons for the students that were hands-on, but also had clear real-world applications.

And so Pitt provided lessons on antibiotic resistance, mitosis and an infectious disease outbreak; the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative taught students about regenerative medicine; and, as a favor to Dr. Reis, scientists from Boston University drove 11 1/2 hours to present their "City Lab -- The Mystery of the Crooked Cell" lesson on electrophoresis and sickle cell anemia.

Shaler seventh-graders Kaila Yallum and Rachel Johnson sat in the tissue engineering classroom, assembling a model of an extracellular matrix that will hold together three "cells," otherwise known as balloons.

Learning about DNA through balloons and models is more fun than doing so through a book, said Kaila, who wants to be a forensic scientist someday.

"It's easier to learn something if you're interested in doing it," said Rachel.

Ms. Loeffler's hope for the day was that seeing the real-world applications of DNA might spark an interest in students for a scientific career.

Downstairs in the library, a group of girls from Dorseyville Middle School are already focused on scientific careers.

Emma Horowitz, 12, wants to be a neonatologist, a doctor specializing in high-risk newborns. The session that she attended yesterday on antibiotic resistance was "more hands-on, more advanced" than her regular science classes, she said.

Sitting across the table from Emma, 12-year-old Erica Chang appreciated the pace of the antibiotics lecture, saying that Brian DiRienzo, coordinator of the Pitt Gene Team, explained concepts well but kept the lecture moving.

And the lesson on antibiotics will serve not just her future plans to work with animals but also her everyday life.

"I'm definitely going to think about it," she said of her newfound knowledge of bacteria. "I'm going to think about it at lunch when I eat my cheese."