BACTERIA DON'T NORMALLY glow fluorescent green. But on Wednesday, a group of ninth-grade biology students at Oakland Technical High School clustered around a small petri dish and stared at the neon dots that had appeared overnight.

At the age of 14, they had taken an ordinary organism and transformed it into a flashy new life form — one with a fluorescent jellyfish gene.

"Whoa, it's glow in the dark!" one student said, as biology teacher Kathy Keeran shined a light over the dish.

The genetic maneuver conducted by the accelerated biology class, with the help of instructors, isn't found in most high school science textbooks. It was based on discoveries made by Roger Tsien, the UC San Diego scientist who won a 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

For years, Keeran's students have been able to access such emerging biotechnology concepts through a consortium of roughly 140 East Bay science teachers. The East Bay Biotechnology Education Project, funded by the Genentech Foundation for Biomedical Sciences, schools teachers in genetic engineering concepts and shows them how to run the labs. It also loans teachers the costly equipment necessary for such experiments and charges only a small fee for the material — in this case, jellyfish genes and bacteria.

"I have some schools where the teachers have $100 for the entire school year for all of their biology classes," said Shary Rosenbaum, who taught high school science in Walnut Creek before she became director of the consortium. Kits for such labs typically cost at least $80 apiece, she said, and they usually can't be used more than once.

Keeran, who has been teaching at the North Oakland high school since 1985, said she encountered some skepticism when she joined the consortium in the early 1990s. "My department chair at the time told me the kids couldn't do these labs, that they couldn't understand genetics," she said.

Today, Keeran's advanced students learn how to create a DNA fingerprint and how to make copies of genetic material, in addition to the "bacterial transformation" involved in this week's lesson.

Not everyone completed the lab successfully this week, but they said they enjoyed the challenge.

"It's very rewarding to work on a project this advanced and sophisticated in high school, especially in my freshman year," said Julian Medina, 14.

With a basic grasp of how DNA works, Keeran said, students can better understand the scientific news of the day — from stem cell research to cloning — and some might further their studies in biotechnology.

By next year, however, the biomedical foundation that has underwritten the consortium will be integrated into the larger Genentech Foundation, which has a broader scope. Rosenbaum says she plans to apply for another annual grant, but that funding is uncertain.

Teachers who wish to participate in the East Bay Biotechnology Education Project's workshops can learn more about the program by visiting its Web site at ebbep.org