Promoting hypothesis‐driven thinking in the undergraduate biochemistry lab

Abstract

We have developed a Course‐based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), which is built on a combination of traditional wet lab techniques (protein expression, chromatography, electrophoresis, protein and activity assays) and bioinformatics tools (sequence and structure alignment, visualization and molecular docking). Two major factors have led to this project ‐ the initiative of students and the influence of collaborators. Students in our research groups at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Dowling College developed the ProMOL plugin for PyMOL, which enabled us to perform active site alignments between two enzymes. They then enhanced ProMOL to include a library of one thousand enzyme active site templates, which they used to predict functions for unannotated protein structures in the Protein Data Bank. They added sequence and backbone alignments to our bioinformatics approach, then insisted on moving into the wet lab to validate the functions they had predicted. In this process, we saw our students make such remarkable strides as scientists that we decided to replicate this approach in an undergraduate biochemistry teaching lab. The project, which we call BASIL, for Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab, now involves thirteen faculty members teaching the lab on eight campuses. We are now engaged in a longer term assessment and evaluation of student growth as scientists in this teaching lab setting.Support or Funding InformationThis work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Awards #1503811 and #1709170, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences under Award #78077, and the campuses represented in the BASIL project.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.