For the past three years, students involved in the Molecular Genetics course have collaborated with students from either the Developmental Biology or Diseases of the Nervous System courses to conduct a research-based, multi-week project using microarrays to measure changes in gene expression in chicken embryos or neurons following chemical exposure. Chicken microarrays were obtained from and scanned by the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT), a project geared towards motivating undergraduate research, formerly sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. To continue the cross-course collaboration and give students access to newer techniques, the current project switches to an alternative, more current technology, PCR-based arrays, and adds electrophysiology and qPCR to enable follow-up confirmatory studies and extend student learning. This effort has three foci: 1) redesign of lab activities to incorporate the use of PCR arrays, electrophysiology, and other molecular techniques to study altered gene expression levels, 2) inclusion of faculty at neighboring institutions to reach additional first generation and minority students, and 3) dissemination of lab protocols to other institutions as a viable methodology for teaching development, neuroscience, and molecular biology in college lab courses.
Intellectual Merit: The initial project increased the learning gains of students across the biology sub-disciplines by engaging them in the process of discovery. Participating students in the current courses are gaining skills in experimental design, collaborative research, use of multiple technology platforms, and data presentation.
Broader Impacts: At the national level a large number of institutions that relied on the GCAT program are now seeking to fill the gap left by the termination of that resource. The new approaches being developed by this project offer important alternative strategies to the GCAT-user community.
This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts toward support of Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education
