The importance of teaching the Luria-Delbrück experiment to biology students is increasingly recognized by educators, and improved pedagogical methods for teaching the classic experiment have been proposed and tested in the classroom. However, there are still obstacles that impede the proper teaching of the classic experiment. This note proposes…

Wheat powdery mildew is an important fungal pathogen of wheat with an obligatory biotrophic lifestyle (a parasite that can only develop on a living host). We investigated the genetics of this host-pathogen interaction by using phenotyping and PCR assays to detect genes in both wheat and powdery mildew, which are known determinants of the outcome…

The threat of climate change makes it increasingly important for biologists and the public to understand how organisms respond to temperature. The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) predicts that temperature should affect organism performance, with implications for species interactions and ecosystems that span disciplines including mathematics,…

The curriculum for undergraduate Agricultural Engineering does not usually include much laboratory practice. In order to address this, here we propose the design of a practical class on legume-rhizobia symbiosis, using an interdisciplinary approach that takes elements from botany, agriculture, and microbiology. The students perform an assay to…

Purpose: Hands-on training in tissue engineering is often associated with specialized labs and expensive equipment, such as CO[subscript 2] incubators. To minimize the use of costly commercial incubators and provide a more vivid engineering experience in a biology lab, we present a hands-on project that introduces medium to large groups of…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) project refers to experiments conducted to address problems, make improvements, or discover new things in those fields that can be tested using the scientific method. This paper describes a long-term STEM project in which pre-service science teachers (PSSTs) have a chance to discover new…

Owing to the global spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), education has shifted to distance online learning, whereas some face-to-face courses have been resumed with the improvement of the outbreak prevention and management situation, including a laboratory course for senior undergraduate students in chemical biology. Here, we present…

In the course of combining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the science education curriculum, the relevance of the micro- and macroalgae in education is based on the biotechnological future-oriented significance and the ever-growing trend toward plant-based nutrition. So, the micro- and macroalgae are finding their way onto the food…

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…

In an upper-division interdisciplinary laboratory experiment, students use Raman spectroscopy to highlight how the overall structure and conformational order of lipid bilayers can be influenced by their individual phospholipid composition. Students prepare a supported lipid bilayer, as a model cell membrane, by spreading liposomes made of various…

A number of scholars have shown the prevalence of multiple metaphors in biological conceptions of the living cell. However, there is little research into unpacking these metaphors to understand their ideological implications for scientific knowledge and science education. In this paper, I perform a critical discourse analysis of the representation…

John Dewey's aesthetics subverts and transcends traditional aesthetics. He applied his empiricism philosophy into the field of aesthetics and re-established the significance of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience comes from daily experience; hence it is not fundamentally different from students' biological learning experience. Based on…

Chemists have always designed and deployed cross-disciplinary approaches that interface chemistry with other disciplines to proffer solutions to many human problems. We designed a laboratory experiment that implements chemistry concepts in a biological model to prime undergraduate students to appreciate interdisciplinarity as an approach to…

Virtual experiments offer opportunities for students to engage in the scientific process and observe scientific phenomena. However, virtual experiments are not always effective for learning. The current study examined how two small manipulations might support better learning from virtual experiments and the extent to which this varied across…

Recent emphasis on research competencies in undergraduate biology education means that more students are doing course-based research. Professional research scientists learn from failed research, but undergraduate students who encounter failure in their biology lab research may not always respond in ways that advance their learning. There is a need…