Providing hands-on practical education without access to laboratories during the COVID-19 pandemic has required creativity and innovation. In this paper, co-authored by academic staff and students, we describe an at-home mobile phone-based 'spectrophotometer' experiment used in an introductory undergraduate biology course. Using colour picker…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of argumentation, during the hypothetico-deductive reasoning (HDR) process in the problem-based learning (PBL) approach, on nursing students' achievements and to determine the argumentation levels in the biochemistry course on the topic of endocrine and nervous systems. The participants…

Sex and fertility education is essential to enable people to make informed choices. School is an important source of education, so we examined the current curriculum relating to sex and fertility education in England and compared it with students' accounts of their experiences. We analysed the Awarding Body GCSE science and biology specifications…

Isoenzymes are variant forms of the same enzyme activity that exhibits different tissue distribution. When cells are damaged, intracellular content leaks into the blood stream, making them potential biochemical markers. Undergraduate health sciences students are expected to interpret laboratory findings of serum levels of biochemical markers and…

While metabolism is a fundamental process in physiology, the measurement of metabolism by living animals often requires specialized and expensive equipment. In 2016, I developed a novel laboratory exercise for animal physiology students where students were able to observe the effects of temperature and long-term temperature acclimation on the…

Regulation is a key concept for understanding the dynamics of metabolism in bacteria. This report outlines a simple laboratory experiment aimed at studying a key form of regulation in bacterial metabolism, exemplifying how microbes switch the flux of carbon towards alternative metabolic fates as a function of nutrient availability and according to…

Enzymes are organic molecules known for their catalytic nature because they accelerate metabolic reactions in organisms. The study of enzyme functions and modes of action is essential to understand Biochemistry. This study aimed to analyse the acetylcholinesterase enzymatic activity, as well as the enzymatic inhibition mechanism in practical…

Games can help learners of all ages retain knowledge and build skills such as critical thinking. As such, they could be a useful tool in supporting practical training at the university level. This paper describes the development, use, and evaluation of a card game based on protein purification techniques, for a large cohort of undergraduates…

A number of areas of difficulty in basic numeracy and mathematical skills were identified, which hinder students' success in a foundational biochemistry course. Many students have difficulty with the concepts of pH and buffers (requiring proficiency with logarithms) and enzyme kinetics (requiring algebraic manipulations and graphing). The…

While most studies concerning how Universities respond to crises are based on simulations, we describe how the University of Canterbury responded to a real crisis, a series of major seismic events that caused significant disruption in 2010/2011. We focus on a single, first-year undergraduate biology course in which we modified our teaching…

Cell migration, a fundamental process in development, wound healing, and immune function, is a common topic in undergraduate cell biology courses. We developed laboratory exercises with an inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach in which cell migration could be examined with the scratch assay, adapted from the primary literature. A narrow scratch…

Programmed cell death, or apoptosis, is a cellular pathway by which individual cells self-destruct for the benefit of the organism. In this practical paper, we describe laboratory exercises with an inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach in which undergraduate students compared apoptosis among different types of cultured cells. Ultraviolet (UV)…

This report describes the implementation of a laboratory exercise for an advanced biochemistry or enzyme kinetics class at the undergraduate or graduate level, designed to improve understanding of protein conformational changes associated with the binding of a ligand. Students measure the fluorescence changes induced by the conformational…

Universities play an important role in society and in providing solutions for its problems. Environmental pollution is one of the most serious problems facing the world today. Thus, universities are increasingly including subjects related to the environment and its conservation both in their educational and research programmes. Generally,…

"Sinorhizobium meliloti" is a bacterium of great agroeconomic importance because of its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen in symbiotic association with alfalfa ("Medicago sativa") roots, and it is often used in model studies. We investigated the effects of exopolysaccharides (EPSs) in cell-to-cell and cell-to-surface…