In a General, Organic, and Biological (GOB) Chemistry course designed for allied-health disciplines, new information builds on previous material. It is important for students to retain what they learn throughout the course and be able to integrate the material not only with material from other bioscience courses but also with the metabolism…

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…

This study focuses on exploring pre-service science teachers' conceptual integration understandings in explaining the subject of metabolism with the concepts of physics and chemistry. Action research was employed in this study. Nine pre-service science teachers taking the General Biology II course participated. Participants were taught metabolism…

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…

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a course taught with worksheets on the subject of blood circulation. The study was conducted with students aged 12-13 in a single class at a public middle school. This worksheet has seven questions in total. At the end of the lesson, the students' opinions about the lesson were obtained…

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)…

As COVID-19 restrictions are removed, instructors are faced with two questions: should the course be taught online, via mixed-mode, or through traditional methods, and what effect did online instruction have on students in the course in regards regarding enrolled across eight semesters of metabolism courses using traditional, mixed-mode, and…

Biological systems exhibit strong dynamic variations; for example, a system may have a tendency towards either a steady state, periodic behaviour or chaotic oscillations. These findings, explained by dynamic systems theory, have allowed researchers to formally relate a wide variety of systems, such as the theory of rumour propagation, glucose…

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,…

At some point in the future, if mankind hopes to settle planets outside our solar system, it will be crucial to determine the range of planetary conditions under which human beings could survive and function. In this article, we apply physical considerations to determine the limitations that gravity imposes on several systems governing the human…

In this study, we analyzed data of heart rate and pulse amplitude collected by undergraduate students in a physiology lab course during and after the diving reflex. On average, heart rate was reduced 21% at 15 seconds and 29% at 30 seconds during diving. Pulse amplitude generally decreased but with greater individual variation. There is no…

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,…