Nowadays, novel Biochemistry lab techniques are being introduced at a very fast pace in scientific research. This requires development of new labs for undergraduate Biochemistry courses to equip the students with up-to-date techniques. However, the time limit of Biochemistry labs for undergraduate students represents a major obstacle. This article…

A drug discovery project has been successfully implemented in a first-year general, organic, and biochemistry (GOB) health science course and second-year organic undergraduate chemistry course. This project allows students to apply the fundamental principles of chemistry and biology to a problem of medical significance, practice basic laboratory…

DockoMatic 2.0 is a powerful open source software program (downloadable from sourceforge.net) that allows users to utilize a readily accessible computational tool to explore biomolecules and their interactions. This manuscript describes a practical tutorial for use in the undergraduate curriculum that introduces students to macromolecular…

This article describes a comprehensive treatment of experimental enzyme kinetics strongly coupled to electronic data acquisition and use of spreadsheets to organize data and perform linear and nonlinear least-squares analyses, all in a manner that promotes development of important reasoning skills. Kinetic parameters are obtained for the stable…

The topics of molecular modeling and drug design are studied in a medicinal chemistry course. The recently reported structures of several G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) with bound ligands have been used to develop a simple computer-based experiment employing molecular-modeling software. Knowledge of the specific interactions between a ligand…

I present a laboratory procedure for illustrating transcription, post-transcriptional modification, gene conservation, and comparative genetics for use in undergraduate biology education. Students are individually assigned genes in a targeted biochemical pathway, for which they design and test polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers. In this…

Few laboratory procedures describe the use of circular dichroism (CD) at the undergraduate level. To increase the number of laboratory exercises using CD, a thermal denaturation study of myoglobin using CD is described to assess protein stability. Values obtained from a more classic linear data analysis approach are consistent with data analyzed…

SDS-PAGE is a simple, rapid technique that has many uses in biochemistry and is readily adaptable to the undergraduate laboratory. It is, however, a technique prone to several types of procedural pitfalls. This article describes the use of SDS-PAGE to determine the subunit molecular mass and composition of yeast alcohol dehydrogenase employing…

A main challenge in educating undergraduate students is to introduce them to the Internet and to teach them how to effectively use it in research. To this end, an Internet assignment was developed that introduces students to websites related to biomedical research at the beginning of a biochemistry/molecular biology laboratory course. The basic…

Describes a biophysical chemistry experiment that introduces students to globular protein conformation and microcomputer analysis of initial rate data for the unfolding of proteins. Presents background, materials needed and methodology. Uses a visible spectrometer for analysis. Lists educational benefits derived from the experiment. (ML)