Teaching undergraduates at the interface of chemistry and biology: challenges and opportunitiesHilary Arnold Godwin & Benjamin Lee Davis

The growth of research at the chemistry-biology interface provides a unique opportunity to inspire undergraduate students to pursue careers in science and to educate science and nonscience students broadly in both chemical and biological sciences.

Many of us working at the interface of chemistry and biology were drawn to this field because we enjoy bringing quantita-tive methodologies to bear on important biological and biomedical problems. Yet we often find ourselves in the classroom teach-ing the same introductory courses that our own mentors taught to previous generations of students. How do we convey our enthusi-asm for the dynamic nature of chemical bio-logy when we have so many basic principles and material to cover? Many of us have tried to incorporate biological examples into our introductory chemistry courses, but these often end up feeling like a Band-Aid that has been applied to a problem requiring major surgery.

Lessons from biologyFortunately, as with scientific problems, inspi-ration for big-picture solutions can be taken from the biological community. In 2003, the National Research Council published BIO 2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists1, which reports on a study jointly funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This report contains recom-mendations for the wholesale transformation of how undergraduate biology is taught in the United States. Many of the concepts detailed

in this report—including practical recom-mendations and examples of how interdisci-plinary material, project-based laboratories and research experiences can be effectively incorporated into the undergraduate curri-cula—are relevant not only to the biological sciences, but to related disciplines as well. The conclusions and recommendations from BIO 2010 that are relevant to teaching chemical biology at the undergraduate level include the following1:• Research at the interface of chemistry and

biology is undergoing rapid change, and

the way we teach these disciplines must evolve to reflect these changes; quantitative methods for analysis, modeling and pre-diction must be incorporated into topics that have traditionally been taught more qualitatively.

• Interdisciplinary education is essential to the training of future scientists and to our col-lective scientific enterprise; chemistry and biology curricula must be better integrated to be optimally effective.

• Inquiry-based approaches provide more effective learning experiences for under-

Hilary A. Godwin and Benjamin Lee Davis are in the Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA. e-mail: h-godwin@northwestern.edu ©

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graduate science students; engineering prin-ciples and physics can be used to enhance and augment topics at the chemistry-biology interface.

• Adaptable, interdisciplinary modules can provide an effective means for introducing complex problems and materials from other disciplines into conventional introductory sciences courses.

• Interdisciplinary lecture/seminar courses are critical to providing students with a realistic sense of how science is conducted and how fields are interconnected.

• Laboratory courses should be project-based and should be as interdisciplinary as possible.

• Undergraduates should be encouraged to conduct independent research.One of the most satisfying parts of BIO

2010 is that the report includes detailed lists of concepts and skills that should be mas-tered by future biology students. The report also contains sample curricula, including case studies that provide specific and substantive examples of how these recommendations can be achieved.

New educational initiatives Recognizing that accomplishing these recommendations would require a sig-nificant influx of time, money and enthu-siasm from the scientific community, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute launched the HHMI Professors program (http://www.hhmi.org/grants/individuals/professors.html) in 2002. Although HHMI has promoted excellence and innovation in undergraduate biology education for years through the Undergraduate Science Education Program (http://www.hhmi.org/grants/institutions/), the goals of the Professors program are slightly different. By providing substantial flexible funding for educational projects to individual bio-medical researchers ($1 million per profes-sor over four years), HHMI hoped both to support efforts to innovate undergraduate science and engineering curricula and also to create a cadre of researchers who were fundamentally committed to educational reform who could serve as emissaries to the research community at large. The National Science Foundation has instituted a similar set of awards, the Director’s Distinguished Teaching Scholar Awards. Unlike the HHMI Professors, who tend to address problems in biology or the interface of biology with chemistry and engineering, the first two cohorts of Distinguished Teaching Scholars come from a broad spectrum of fields within the sciences and engineering.

As we enter the fourth and final year of fund-ing for the first cohort of HHMI Professors, it seems a particularly pertinent time to reflect upon the progress that has been made in the wake of BIO 2010 and to comment on chal-lenges that remain. Most, although not all, of the HHMI projects have focused on intro-ducing research experiences into the under-graduate curriculum, either in the context of coursework or through large-scale indepen-dent research programs. (Links to some of the resources that have emerged from these projects are provided in Box 1.) With fund-ing from the HHMI Professors program, we have instituted the Undergraduate Success in Science (USS) program, a six-week summer workshop that introduces incoming fresh-men at Northwestern University to scientific research. During the first two years of the pro-gram, students conducted research on lead con-tamination in soil samples that they collected in the Chicago area. In addition, USS partici-pants conducted outreach projects with local health care workers, builders, hardware stores

and municipal officials to promote awareness of lead poisoning in the community (6% of children in the city of Chicago currently suffer from lead poisoning)2. Following principles developed by Robert Chang and coworkers in the Materials World Module (MWM) pro-gram (http://www.materialsworldmodules.org/aboutmwm.htm), the students learned specific concepts and techniques through dis-covery-based activities before designing their own research experiments and testing environ-mental samples for their final projects.

We have been particularly interested in how the directed research projects devel-oped for the USS summer workshop could be adapted for use in our general chemistry curriculum, so that we could reach a larger number of students. Toward this end, we compiled an inventory of general instruc-tional objectives and specific learning out-comes (Supplementary Table 1 online) that we wished to accomplish over the entire year in the laboratory portion of the course. With funding from the Dreyfus Foundation, we

BOX 1 INNOVATIVE TOOLS FOR CHEMICAL BIOLOGY UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

Some of the most broadly useful tools and resources relevant to innovating change in undergraduate education in chemical biology to emerge over the last three years include the following:

• The National Academies Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology (http://www.academiessummerinstitute.org/), a hands-on workshop for biology faculty for exploring improved models of instruction in introductory biology courses.

• Entering Mentoring (http://www.hhmi.org/grants/pdf/labmgmt/entering_mentoring.pdf), a seminar for training new science mentors that can be readily implemented at other institutions.

• The Survey of Undergraduate Research Experiences (SURE), the first set of findings from a survey of over 1,000 undergraduates conducting research at over 40 institu-tions, providing insights into best practices14.

• Biointeractive (http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/), a website with libraries of anima-tions, video clips, virtual labs and lectures on a variety of interdisciplinary biomedi-cally related topics.

• Biology for Engineers (http://www.biologyforengineers.org/), a website with resources for developing an introductory biology course for undergraduate engineering majors, including a downloadable interactive tutorial (“Biological Information Handling: Essentials for Engineers”), that includes basic information, animations and interac-tive tests covering replication, transcription and translation.

• The MIT Biology Education Group website (http://www.cfkeep.org/html/snapshot.php?id=79434230), which includes links to a comprehensive biology concept frame-work, protocols for new undergraduate labs, three-dimensional protein structure modules and PowerPoint enhancement for introductory biology lectures.

• Genomics in Education Resouces (http://www.nslc.wustl.edu/elgin/genomics) of Washington University at St. Louis, including a video tour of the Genome Sequencing Center that explains the process of genome sequencing and a tour of a sophomore laboratory that is using bioinformatics tools to move from genotype to phenotype.

• A new course on chemical biology for sophomores, including a laboratory manual and mentoring guide for teaching assistants, developed by A. Schepartz and coworkers at Yale University (http://www.schepartzlab.yale.edu/chembiolsoph/index.html).

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then adapted the soil-sampling module and implemented this framework in our general chemistry laboratories (with over 650 fresh-men) this past fall (2004).

Stress as an interdisciplinary themeIn the third year of Northwestern’s USS program, we decided to explore the chem-istry and biology of a topic that is all too familiar to incoming first-year students: stress. Our goal was to implement this labo-ratory unit into the spring quarter of the general chemistry laboratory, as the topics covered during that quarter (acid-base equi-libria, buffering, kinetics, redox reactions and electrochemistry) are easily related to important concepts in chemical biology and can be readily illustrated with examples related to stress. Because an important theme of chemical biology is the quantification of biological parameters, the final project was to evaluate and test commercial biosensors for stress hormones.

Physiological stress is most easily quanti-fied by measuring products of the adrenal gland, such as epinephrine, norepinephrine or cortisol3. The relatively large concentra-tions and multitude of blood-borne analytes make blood an attractive source for gauging stress; however, special handling procedures are required, and the mere act of blood acquisition can affect the results. To circum-vent these issues, researchers have looked

for less invasive techniques and discovered that salivary cortisol can be detected with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) technique4.

With this in mind, we invited 17 incoming Northwestern undergraduates and 6 returning student mentors to be immersed in the chem-istry, biology and psychology involved with the design and use of salivary cortisol ELISA kits (Fig. 1). The students were given a mul-tidimensional education, including lectures, inquiry-based laboratories, leadership train-ing and community outreach projects that focused on topics related to stress. In addition, students participated in a stress-management workshop run by Northwestern’s Counseling and Psychological Services program. Scientific lecture topics included endocrinology, psy-chobiology, bioethics, biosensors, statistics, chemical equilibria and kinetics; guest lec-turers from other disciplines were brought in when possible. The inquiry-based laboratory activities were assembled from a variety of sources, including a Materials World Module for high school students on biosensors5, the laboratory manual we had previously been using in general chemistry at Northwestern6, and three articles from the Journal of Chemical Education7–9. Topics included studying lumi-nescence of luciferase obtained from firefly lanterns5, designing an effective buffer6,7, studying enzyme kinetics both qualitatively5 and quantitatively8,9, and making and testing a

peroxide biosensor5 (Supplementary Table 2 online). Students were explicitly taught how to search the scientific literature, keep a good lab-oratory notebook, write a laboratory report, develop a hypothesis and design well-con-trolled experiments. For their final research project, students evaluated a series of commer-cially available salivary cortisol ELISA kits for accuracy, precision and dynamic range10–12. They then tested a hypothesis that they had developed concerning stress and cortisol. Students were able to experience firsthand the multidisciplinary approach that is required to fully assess and solve modern problems.

Given that some of the individual exer-cises were taken from previously published work, one may ask how these modules differ from conventional general chemistry labo-ratory exercises. There are several significant differences:• The quarter-long sessions are themati-

cally linked and consist of discovery-based (open-ended) activities that teach students particular concepts and tools needed to per-form the final design project.

• Students work in teams; different approaches to learning and strategies for division of labor are taught directly.

• Validation of techniques and proper con-trol experiments are explicitly discussed and incorporated into both the activities and the design project.

• Students are responsible for developing their own hypotheses and protocols to test those hypotheses; the students meet with an instructor or teaching assistant before final testing to get feedback on their project design.Anecdotally, students from the workshop

report a sense of ownership in their projects and a high level of interest in the outcomes of their experiments. However, we still have a considerable amount of work to do before the stress unit is fully incorporated into our general chemistry curriculum. Perhaps most significantly, our experiences during the first year of implementation suggest that class size is a major issue: it is not as easy to have open-ended laboratories when an instructor is working with 650 students as it is with 20 students in the pilot program. In addition, the course and teacher evalua-tions from the general chemistry course from the fall of 2004 suggest that students would benefit from explicitly defined connections and greater synchronicity between the labo-ratory exercises and the lecture portion of the class. Critically, we as a community need to work (for example, with the Committee on Professional Training of the American Chemical Society13) to develop compre-

Figure 1 HHMI postdoctoral fellow Ben Davis (second from left) works with incoming Northwestern freshmen and student mentors to test salivary cortisol levels in the lab.

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hensive concept frameworks for teaching introductory chemistry courses that accu-rately reflect the increasingly interdisciplin-ary nature of science. In the meantime, we at least have 17 incoming freshmen (and 6 older students) who will, we hope, be a little less stressed (and a little more excited about science) when they arrive in the fall.

Note: Supplementary information is available on the Nature Chemical Biology website.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSFunding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professors program and the Dreyfus Foundation Special Grants Program to H.A.G. is gratefully acknowledged. S. Hatch (Director of General Chemistry Laboratories) and J.S. Baker (Visiting Scholar in the USS program)

both have worked extensively on the development of the inquiry-based modules and S. Hatch has been primarily responsible for their implementation into the general chemistry program at Northwestern.

1. National Research Council Committee on Undergraduate Biology Education to Prepare Research Scientists for the 21st Century. BIO 2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2003).

2. Chicago Department of Public Health. Blood Lead Testing Data by Chicago Community Area in 2003. <http://egov.cityofchicago.org> (accessed August, 2005).

3. Germann, W.J. & Stanfield, C.L. Principles of Human Physiology (Pearson Benjamin Cummings, San Francisco, 2005).

4. Dressendorfer, R.A. et al. J. Steroid Biochem. Mol. Biol. 43, 683–692 (1992).

5. Stevens, P.W. et al. Biosensors Module (Materials World Modules, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA, 1998).

6. Hunsberger, L. General Chemistry Laboratory Manual, Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University (Stipes Publishing, L.L.C., Champaign, IL, 2003), Evanston, Illinois, USA, 2004).

7. Russo, S.O. & Hanania, G.I.H. J. Chem. Educ. 64, 817–819 (1987).

8. Johnson, K.A. J. Chem. Educ. 79, 74–76 (2002).9. Bateman Jr., R.C. & Evans, J.A. J. Chem. Educ. 72,

A240–A241 (1995).10. Diagnostic Systems Laboratory ACTIVE Cortisol (Saliva)

EIA Kit package insert <http://secure.dslabs.com/Documents//inserts/10-67100p.pdf>.

11. Salimetrics LLC High Sensitivity Salivary Cortisol Enzyme Immunoassay Kit package insert <http://www.salimetrics.com/newcortisolkitinsert.htm>.

12. NEOGEN Cortisol ELISA Test Kit package insert <http://www.neogen.com/pdf/ResearchCatalog2003/Cortisol.pdf>.

13. Crim, F.F. & Polik, W.F. J. Chem. Educ. 81, 1695–1696 (2004).

14. Lopatto, D. Cell Biol. Educ. [online] 3, 270–277 (2004) (doi: 10.1187/cbe.04-07-0045).

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