Cinemeducation is an effective tool to help students develop humanistic skills. However, there was a need for more studies to find out if this can also be utilized to improve the interest and satisfaction of students learning about rare diseases such as the inborn errors of metabolism. The aim was to introduce cinemeducation as part of early…

Metabolism is always a challenging topic in biochemistry. In our project, a courseware called "Metabolism Metro" was developed. "Metabolism Metro" is a self-learning tool which aims to facilitate students learning of metabolic pathways in an interactive and easy-to-understand manner. The courseware includes both pre-class and…

As a representative catabolic reaction that widely exists in nature, anaerobic digestion (AD) exhibits great value regarding the global carbon cycle, renewable energy development, and environmental protection. Such an important biochemical reaction was ignored before and should be introduced into the teaching and textbooks of undergraduate…

Learning endocrine physiology can be challenging. Some physiological concepts are abstract, making the process of learning more difficult for students. The comprehension of basic concepts, such as chemical hormone classification, is essential to understand the differences in synthesis, secretion, transport, and mechanism of action of hormones. To…

Advances in physiology and other fields are strongly associated with a solid base knowledge of biochemistry and cell metabolism. On the other hand, the complex and abstract nature of metabolic pathways, the traditional lecture method, and other factors made the teaching-learning process of biochemistry a challenging endeavor. To overcome this, we…

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…

Metabolism and its regulation is one of the most complex and difficult topics for students learning biochemistry. A problem-/case-based learning (PBL) approach can be useful to help biochemistry students to fulfill the goal of acquiring an integrated view of metabolism and its regulation. The present article describes our experience enrolling…

Carbohydrates, or in strictly chemical terms, polyhydroxy-aldehydes or ketones represent enormous structural diversity in terms of the arrangement of atoms in space, resulting in hundreds of stereoisomers. Although the chemical properties of most stereoisomers may not be very different, their metabolic fate and utilization in biological systems is…

The modeling of rates of biochemical reactions--fluxes--in metabolic networks is widely used for both basic biological research and biotechnological applications. A number of different modeling methods have been developed to estimate and predict fluxes, including kinetic and constraint-based (Metabolic Flux Analysis and flux balance analysis)…

During COVID-19 pandemic, there was a change in the teaching mode from face-to-face to online teaching. It was especially challenging for teachers to motivate students to learn through distance learning. This shift in teaching mode also lowered student-student and student-teacher interactions. In this project, a biochemistry courseware,…

While the innovativeness of the flipped classroom (FC) approach promotes active participation and higher-order thinking among students, there are concerns about its effectiveness in terms of knowledge retention. Currently, there are no studies involving medical school biochemistry that evaluate this aspect of effectiveness. Thus, we conducted a…

The 8 studs on a 2 × 4 Lego brick conveniently represent the outer shell of electrons for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms. We used Lego bricks to model these atoms, which are then joined together to form molecules by following the Lewis octet rule. A variety of small biological molecules can be modeled in this way, such as most amino acids,…

Compared to aerobic catabolism, the theories and experiments of anaerobic catabolism are not covered in depth in biochemistry education curricula. Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a feasible method for converting common organic compounds to renewable energy-methane that has drawn a great deal of attention in practical applications. In this study, we…

Team-based learning (TBL) is an active learning method used in many educational institutions. However, there are few examples of its use in basic medicine, such as biochemistry in medical schools. This study used TBL to teach glucose metabolism to first-year medical students. The process was in four phases: preclass preparation, readiness…

Metabolism, including cellular respiration, encompasses a large component of the topics covered in foundational biochemistry and life science undergraduate courses. The difficulty in instruction and student retention of this topic lies in the conceptualization of the numerous enzymatic reactions involving various substrates/products and their…