Adding Spice to the Lab with BASIL: Combining Wet‐Lab Protein Biochemistry with Computational Analysis to Analyze Proteins of Unknown Function

Abstract

Most undergraduates studying biochemistry and molecular biology get their broadest exposure to wet‐lab techniques in protein and nucleic acid chemistry (and, increasingly, computer/visualization) in their upper‐level laboratory courses. Students in these classes are juniors and seniors with well‐defined career goals. Many will have already had a research background in a traditional one‐to‐one (or one‐to‐few) research mentoring setting, for example a summer research program – an experience known to increase student learning and persistence in the sciences. At the same time, extended full‐time PI‐directed research is limited in the number of students served, and can even present a barrier. To broaden the impact of teaching through research, many practitioners have adopted the CURE, or Course‐based Undergraduate Research Experience, approach.This presentation reports on BASIL (Biochemical Authentic Scientific Inquiry Laboratory), the result of a team of faculty who have worked to bring computational and wet‐lab protein science to the biochemistry teaching lab. Together, we have developed a protein biochemistry CURE to determine enzymatic function of proteins of unknown activity. With eleven modules available online (basiliuse.blogspot.com), the BASIL curriculum represents a one‐semester upper level biochemistry laboratory course; five of the modules are computational/structural, while six are wet‐lab protein expression, isolation, and analysis experiments. Because the computational tools may be more challenging for biochemistry faculty and students to adopt than typical bench methods, we have developed a suite of analysis tools available on a USB stick. This presentation summarizes the status of BASIL on multiple campuses and seeks to promote further adaptation of this CURE.Support or Funding InformationNSF IUSE Awards 1709278, 1503710This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.