modeling-an-enzyme-active-site-using-molecular-visualization-freeware

Modeling an Enzyme Active Site using Molecular Visualization Freeware

Biomolecular visualization skills are paramount to understanding key concepts in the biological sciences, such as structure-function relationships and ...

College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University

Content and emphases in undergraduate biochemistry courses can be readily tailored to accommodate the standards of the department in which they are housed, as well as the backgrounds of the students in the courses. A more challenging issue is how to construct laboratory experiences for a class with both chemistry majors, who usually have little or no experience with biochemical techniques and biology and biochemistry majors who do. This manuscript describes a strategy for differentiating biochemistry labs to meet the needs of students with differing backgrounds.

Differentiating biochemistry course laboratories based on student experience.

To help faculty prepare and revise courses in all the disciplines represented in the MCAT(2015) , the American Association of Medical Colleges, through its MedEdPORTAL's iCollaborative, has established the Pre-health Collection, a repository of reviewed web resources that are openly and freely available to faculty, and indirectly through them to students. The Pre-health Collection initiative makes use of the Internet to centralize teaching resources and to help faculty at institutions with fewer available resources to incorporate high quality teaching material specifically reviewed to assist students in obtaining the required pre-health competencies. As biochemistry competencies are increasingly represented in the new exam, it is important to grow the number of quality teaching resources for biochemistry within the portal and to develop a community of users and contributors. A description of the Pre-Health Collection and mechanisms for contributions are presented.

The pre-health collection within MedEdPORTAL's iCollaborative: helping faculty prepare students for the competencies in the new MCAT(2015) exam.

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) are used widely in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and clinical medicine labs. At the same time, they appear to be underrepresented in chemistry and biochemistry curricula, even though their sensitivity, selectivity, and ease of use would argue for their widespread use. We describe here an online ELISA activity suitable for stand-alone use or in conjunction with an actual wet lab ELISA. Specifically, we offer real and mock data for a hypothetical ELISA to detect plasma antibodies to COVID-19 in infected patients who have had the disease. Much of the activity focuses on chemical and mathematical models to fit ELISA or any macromolecule/ligand binding data, a skill that addresses perhaps the most relevant and difficult learning goal of an ELISA experiment.

A virtual ELISA to quantitate COVID-19 antibodies in patient serum.

Our climate is changing due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases from the production and use of fossil fuels. Present atmospheric levels of CO were last seen 3 million years ago, when planetary temperature sustained high Arctic camels. As scientists and educators, we should feel a professional responsibility to discuss major scientific issues like climate change, and its profound consequences for humanity, with students who look up to us for knowledge and leadership, and who will be most affected in the future. We offer simple to complex backgrounds and examples to enable and encourage biochemistry educators to routinely incorporate this most important topic into their classrooms.

Introducing climate change into the biochemistry and molecular biology curriculum.

While molecular visualization has been recognized as a threshold concept in biology education, the explicit assessment of students' visual literacy skills is rare. To facilitate the evaluation of this fundamental ability, a series of NSF-IUSE-sponsored workshops brought together a community of faculty engaged in creating instruments to assess students' biomolecular visualization skills. These efforts expanded our earlier work in which we created a rubric describing overarching themes, learning goals, and learning objectives that address student progress toward biomolecular visual literacy. Here, the BioMolViz Steering Committee (BioMolViz.org) documents the results of those workshops and uses social network analysis to examine the growth of a community of practice. We also share many of the lessons we learned as our workshops evolved, as they may be instructive to other members of the scientific community as they organize workshops of their own.

Henry Jakubowski

College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University

Modeling an Enzyme Active Site using Molecular Visualization Freeware