Video views and reviews.

Abstract

Most of us who teach undergraduates are constantly searching for better ways of making complex cellular phenomena more accessible and understandable, especially at the introductory level. Our instructional efforts are especially taxed when trying to convey with static diagrams or cartoons such dynamic events as membrane ruffling, endocytosis and exocytosis, and vesicular and protein targeting. Since 1998, when they first began appearing in electronically archived issues, I have used research videos from Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBC) as teaching aids, and I have agreed to write a column periodically reviewing the videos published in current issues of this journal and in other sources for the readership of Cell Biology Education. The majority of such records present the behavior of chimeric proteins that have been expressed linked with Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), and examples of how such videos can be used in cell biology problem sets may be viewed at http://cr.middlebury.edu/biology/scb/or ... //scb2/. Several caveats, however! These essays primarily reflect my judgment about the suitability of particular videos as teaching aids and not about their scientific merit or that of the parent article; the latter quality presumably has already been established by their publication. In this regard, my students and I have found it especially important to remember that many published videos are research records; that is, they often seem