An official website of the United States government
In the Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) course-based undergraduate research experience, students use a series of computational (sequence and structure comparison, docking) and wet lab (protein expression, purification, and concentration; sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis [SDS-PAGE]; enzyme activity and kinetics) modules to predict and test the function of protein structures of unknown function found in the Protein Data Bank and UniProt. BASIL was established in 2015 with a core of 10 faculty members on six campuses, with the support of an educational researcher and doctoral student on a seventh campus. Since that time, the number of participating faculty members and campuses has grown, and we have adapted our curriculum to improve access for all who are interested. We have also expanded our curriculum to include new developments that are appearing in computational approaches to life science research. In this article, we provide a history of BASIL, explain our current approach, describe how we have addressed challenges that have appeared, and describe our curriculum development pipeline and our plans for moving forward in a sustainable and equitable fashion.
more »
« less
Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic by the Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) CURE Consortium: Reflections and a Case Study on the Switch to Remote Learning
Campus shutdowns during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic posed unique challenges to faculty and students engaged in laboratory courses. Formerly hands-on experiments had to be quickly pivoted to emergency remote learning. While some resources existed prior to this period, many currently available online modules and/or simulations focus on a single technique. The Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) curriculum has, for several years, provided a robust, linked, holistic inquiry experience that allows students to make connections between multiple techniques, both computational in nature as well as wet-lab based. As a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), this flexible, module-based curriculum allows students to generate original hypotheses based on analysis of proteins of unknown function. We have taught this curriculum as the upper-level laboratory course on our campuses and were obliged to transition to remote instruction at various points in the course sequence. We report on the experiences of faculty and students over the transition period in this course. Additionally, we report as a case study results of one of our campus’ ongoing discipline-based education research (DBER) on the BASIL curriculum prior to and during remote delivery.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10184725
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Chemical Education
- ISSN:
- 0021-9584
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Course‐based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) can be a very effective means to introduce a large number of students to research. CUREs are often an extension of the instructor's research, which may make them difficult to replicate in other settings because of differences in expertise or facilities. The BASIL (Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab) CURE has evolved over the past 4 years as faculty members with different backgrounds, facilities, and campus cultures have all contributed to a robust curriculum focusing on enzyme function prediction that is suitable for implementation in a wide variety of academic settings. © 2019 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 47(5):498–505, 2019.more » « less
-
Teaching students how to think like scientists is a critical but challenging goal in biochemistry education. The Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) initiative was conceived by Dr Paul Craig from the Rochester Institute of Technology and is led by colleagues across multiple institutions. They have developed an innovative curriculum that transforms traditional cookbook-style laboratory courses into authentic research experiences, also known as a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). By investigating real proteins with unknown functions, students learn essential scientific skills while expanding our knowledge of protein biochemistry.more » « less
-
Undergraduate science students who volunteer within a research laboratory group, or participate in funded research opportunities, in general are those who have the opportunity to engage in authentic research. In this article, we report the findings from two different iterations of a semester-long collaboration between a biology faculty member and a science education faculty member at a major research institution in the Southeastern United States. Specifically, the faculty members designed an ecology laboratory course for upper-level undergraduate students (primarily biology majors) where they would engage in an original and highly authentic ecological research project. The goal of this course was to have students explicitly learn about the nature of science (NOS), and authentic scientific practices such as inquiry and experimentation in the context of their own research. In the second year of the course, the global COVID-19 pandemic forced us to modify our approach to accomplish the same goals, but now in a remote and online format. Using questionnaires, concept inventories, and semi-structured interviews, the impact of the course on students’ understandings of NOS, inquiry, and experimentation, in addition to their perspectives on the experience within the course compared to prior laboratory coursework, was investigated. We found that students showed modest gains in each of the aforementioned desirable outcomes. These gains were generally comparable in both face-to-face and remote course settings. Additionally, students shared with us their preference for authentic laboratory work as compared with the typical laboratory work with its given research question and step-by-step instructions. Our research demonstrates what is possible in both face-to-face and remote undergraduate laboratory courses in biology and the positive impact that was observed in our students. We hope it serves as a model for other scientists and science educators as they collaborate to design authentic research-based coursework for undergraduate biology students.more » « less
-
Students at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Dowling College used bioinformatics software, which they had helped develop, to predict the function of protein structures whose functions had not been assigned or confirmed. Over the course of time, they incorporated other bioinformatics tools and moved the project to the wet lab, where they sought to confirm their in silico predictions with in vitro assays. In this process, we saw so much personal and professional growth among our students that we chose to implement their approach in an undergraduate biochemistry teaching lab, which we call BASIL, for Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab. This curriculum has now been implemented by thirteen faculty members on eight campuses, and we look forward to a long-range exploration of BASIL’s impact on the students who enroll in courses that use the BASIL curriculum.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00729
