Communication and collaboration are key science competencies that support sharing of scientific knowledge with experts and non-experts alike. On the one hand, they facilitate interdisciplinary conversations between students, educators, and researchers, while on the other they improve public awareness, enable informed choices, and impact policy…

Research and education are two areas often compartmentalised or separated by an abyss, linked in this study by a service-learning methodology, the Small World Initiative project. The programme instruction starts at the university, reaches secondary school and returns to university to complete the research, challenging young students to discover…

Students who experience research as undergraduates tend to remain in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Since course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are often expensive to implement, we developed a relatively inexpensive first-semester research course for majors entitled "Freshman Research in…

Lab courses are a significant component of biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) education. In teaching the labs, we combine established techniques with novel approaches. Lab formats have also moved from traditional cookbook style labs to guided inquiry to course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), where faculty bring their own…

The New Horizons in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education Conference was organized by the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) in collaboration with the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and held in Rehovot, Israel, on September 6-8, 2017. The…

Integrating genetic engineering and molecular biology lab activities into open inquiry-based teaching is an innovative, unique process that has taken place in Israeli high schools since 2018, becoming part of biology studies for 11th- and 12th-grade students. Engaging these students in lab techniques and practices in this field enables them to…

An undergraduate online course on Applied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology was developed through different formats of case study that included lecture, class discussion, small-groups discussion, and individual work. Cases covering health, biotechnology, agriculture, and other issues were developed or adapted from the literature to reach the…

Drawing is a teaching tool that provides numerous benefits to student learning, including enhanced knowledge retention, improved observation skills, and increased engagement with course content. However, these exercises also place high cognitive demands on students and require a considerable time commitment. To acknowledge and celebrate the effort…

Protein engineering represents a modern approach to generate novel proteins for the different fields of biotechnology. Here, we report about an 8-day laboratory activity in which students generate enzyme variants to degrade the herbicide glyphosate. The students conduct a true research experiment in an important field (bioremediation by novel,…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, all on-campus activities were required to be adapted to a distance-learning format, which was especially challenging for practical courses. Molecular biology is a mandatory course for biology undergraduates at Universidade Federal Fluminense. To overcome the impossibility of practical activities, we proposed…

The transition to tertiary level learning requires students take responsibility for their own learning and independently synthesise conceptual knowledge specific to their discipline. We designed an interactive online lesson that aimed to build student engagement and foster self-regulation of understanding for a foundation concept in molecular…

The attractive photophysical properties of luminescent nanoparticles have prompted numerous studies on their synthesis and biological applications. Due to the complexity of components, sizes, morphologies, and strong light scattering of the nanoparticles the absorption spectrum alone is not enough for characterising and analysing the real…

Ensuring currency with trends, knowledge, and understanding of teaching and learning is essential for all educators. Researching learning and teaching is an enormous field which can range from examining the practical impact of new classes to research into the processes of learning. The "Publishing in Education" conference session…

We present a drawing discovery lab that crosscuts multiple disciplines in biology and links concepts in genetics and evolutionary thinking to enhance understanding of the genotype-to-phenotype transformation. These combined concepts are also linked to ecological frameworks in nature through the model of biological plasticity. Students and teachers…

In this paper, we propose and describe a new approach, named BarcodingGO, to teach environmental DNA and bioinformatics concepts to undergraduate or graduate students in molecular biology-related fields. The learning pipeline proposed here aims to solve a simulated environmental monitoring problem, in which a biodiversity survey of a particular…