Teaching research skills to the undergraduate bioscience students through COVID-19 studies

Abstract

Objective: To describe experience of teaching research skills to the undergraduate bioscience students through COVID-19 studies.Methodology: Undergraduate students taking physiology, microbiology or biomanufacturing at a public college in Kansas City Kansas, during spring 2020 to fall 2023 were encouraged and mentored to 1) do literature survey on COVID-19 2) read the COVID-19 related clinical case study 3) read the COVID-19 related review article 4) learn basic bioinformatics tools 4) prepare and present poster in scientific conference 5) prepare review article.Results: This exercise allowed the students to learn using search engines like PubMed to find reliable information about the disease such as COVID-19. In the fall semester of 2020, students prepared a research paper about the coronavirus, COVID-19 disease, its symptoms and transmission. In the fall semester of 2022, students performed literature survey using PubMed, prepare presentations on various aspects of COVID-19 and wrote a review article. Students read review article about COVID-19 in the Spring semester of 2023 and responded to the questions related to the article. In the fall of 2021, students learned about the clinical aspects of COVID-19 by reading a clinical case study. This also helped students to understand molecular techniques like polymerase chain reaction (PCR), serology tests and how they are used to diagnose the disease. Similarly, in spring of 2022 students learned using NCBI tools to find the genomic and protein sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and its spike protein respectively. They also learned to design primers for PCR for the detection of coronavirus. Finally, students prepared and presented the poster on COVID-19 in a scientific conference.Conclusion: The methodology adopted enabled training the students to learn many research skills like literature survey, write review article, thoroughly read articles, understand the mechanism behind PCR, learn basic bioinformatics, prepare research poster and give scientific presentations. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.