Offering authentic research experiences to all Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) majors at a large university can be challenging. BMB at UMass Amherst has developed a series of Course‐Based Undergraduate Research experiences (CUREs), required for all majors. One of these focuses on studying Malate dehydrogenase (MDH) isoforms in Trypanosoma brucei, a protozoan parasite that causes African sleeping sickness. This organism utilizes oxidative phosphorylation of amino acids during growth in its Tsetse fly host, but is strictly glycolytic during growth in the mammalian bloodstream, thus understanding metabolic regulation in T. brucei is important to elucidating how the parasite proliferates in the host. T. brucei has three functional MDH isoforms localized to mitochondria, cytoplasm or glycosomes, respectively. MDH is an important enzyme that catalyzes the oxidation of oxaloacetate to malate, concomitant with the reduction of NAD+ to NADH. It highly conserved and important not only as part of the citric acid cycle reactions but also as part of gluconeogenesis and of the malate aspartate shuttle used to maintain redox balance. The wealth of structural and functional information about MDH from model organisms is used to inform studies of the orthologs from a range of evolutionarily distinct organisms, currently being conducted by a consortium of collaborating faculty from various colleges and universities out as part of the protein‐centric MDH CURE community (MCC). This collaboration gives faculty and students access to community beyond the students and instructors in the course. We have generated clones for recombinant expression of all three trypanosome MDHs and have begun kinetic analyses on the cytoplasmic and glycosomal isoforms, and are optimizing expression levels for the mitochondrial form. Students can design a projects de novo or choose to continue a project from students in a previous semester. During the term students give a presentation and have many writing assignments, with opportunities for peer review and revision, all teams present their results in a department‐wide poster session at the end of the semester. Projects a have included comparisons between recombinant forms with C‐ or N‐terminal tags and between different isoforms, or orthologs of different organisms, function at different temperature, pH or ionic strength. These studies provide tools for further analysis of biochemical and kinetic properties of the T. brucei enzymes and to perform comparative analyses with well characterized mammalian and plant MDH enzymes.Support or Funding InformationNSF IUSE “An Interdisciplinary Faculty Community Using a Protein‐focused Course Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) to Improve Student Learning,”This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.