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Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have numerous benefits for students who participate in them. These include improvements in scientific identity, content knowledge gains, and increased persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. A CURE is generally accepted as possessing the features of scientific relevance and background, hypothesis development and proposal, experimentation, teamwork, collaboration, reproducibility, data analysis with evidence based conclusions, and presentation of results. In biochemistry and related fields, CUREs are most often manifested in an upper level lab course that is usually available to upperclassmen and generally populated by students who require that course for their major. There has been growing interest and success in implementing biochemistry CUREs in courses for underclassmen and non-biochemistry majors. Though CUREs predominately require benchtop research activities, expanding CUREs beyond the laboratory setting is one strategy for realizing CURE benefits in larger student populations. A "virtual" protein structure-focused CURE that is assigned as a semester-long research project in a second semester biochemistry lecture course is described here. The structure of this assignment was developed ad hoc in 2020 during an in-person biochemistry CURE that had to be converted to online-only due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has since been incorporated into Biochemistry II (CHEM 3052; n=27.5 students) at the University of Louisiana at Monroe as part of the overall teaching strategy in that class. The project is modeled off of the successful Malate Dehydrogenase CUREs Community (MCC). Students are tasked with selecting a malate dehydrogenase (MDH) homolog from a provided list; proposing a novel, unpublished point mutation; and running a series of computational analyses with freely available tools to determine if their hypothesized effect is realized in the mutated enzyme. Successful completion of the project requires the student to learn how to generate and analyze multiple sequence alignments, search structural databases such as the Protein Data Bank (PDB), and become proficient in protein visualization software and structural prediction methods. Students are assessed through their thoroughly researched and supported hypothesis proposal midway through the semester and a written report with analysis of their findings at the end of the semester. Key progress benchmarks are set throughout the semester to minimize procrastination and students are given multiple opportunities for feedback in the form of draft revisions and mandatory instructor meetings. Though designed with MDH in mind, the basic scaffold of this assignment is easily adaptable to structural analysis of other proteins of interest, providing an opportunity for instructors to customize the experience for their specific interests and classroom populations. All computational tools used for this assignment are either freely available or can be accessed with a free educational license. This CURE structure can then be applied to classes from small to large enrollment, introductory or advanced level, and in institutions that may be resource limited in their ability to conduct biochemical experiments. The original development of this project occurred under support from NSF-1726932.
John F. Rakus (Fri,) studied this question.