Interdisciplinary collaborations are often essential to answer multi-faceted questions, yet they present with many challenges such as understanding the information, methodologies, and norms of another field and effective communication between team members. We must begin to provide young scientists with the skills necessary for success as the call for more interdisciplinary science expands. We have developed a Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) in which students investigate proteins with unknown functions that are available in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) in an attempt to assign biochemical function. We have modelled an interdisciplinary collaboration at the undergraduate level using the BASIL Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). Students in upper-level Biochemistry and Structural Biology courses collaborated over the course of a semester. The Structural Biology students used bioinformatics tools including the ProMOL plugin to the PyMOL molecular graphics environment, along with BLAST, Pfam, and Dali to predict protein functions. In parallel, the Biochemistry students expressed and purified the proteins and carried out <i>in vitro</i> testing, informed by the <i>in silico</i>-predicted enzyme function. Students came together in cross-disciplinary teams throughout the project to share progress, explain their discipline-specific methodologies, and discuss next steps. They each presented an oral progress report on the entire project, which required that they not only understand their own work but that of their collaborators. Interdisciplinary teams presented final posters to the campus community and students prepared future directions documents. We had students fill out a pre- and post-assessment. The assessment had two foci: the effectiveness of the cross-course collaboration model and assessment of content learning. We see that students learned the information and methodologies of both their own discipline and that of their collaborators. Moreover students appear to have increased their ability to communicate to and learn from their collaborators.

Modeling interdisciplinary collaborations through a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE)

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.