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Deep Reading of the Literature and the Biosynthesis of Nucleotides
Author(s) -
Anderson Ellen
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2018.32.1_supplement.663.18
Subject(s) - comprehension , nucleotide , set (abstract data type) , biosynthesis , computer science , biochemistry , pyrimidine metabolism , computational biology , purine , chemistry , biology , enzyme , programming language , gene
Biosynthesis of Nucleotides is a Master's level elective course that was developed to advance students' comprehension of peer‐reviewed articles using a detailed study of the biosynthesis of purine and pyrimidine ribonucleotides and their conversion to deoxyribonucleotides. Nucleotides are ubiquitous molecules essential for nearly every biochemical pathway serving as substrates, regulatory molecules or monomers for RNA and DNA synthesis. Many medical conditions are the result of abnormalities in these biosynthetic pathways and their enzymes are targets for pharmaceutical intervention. Unfortunately, one‐semester biochemistry courses rarely have time to cover nucleotide metabolism. Coupling this fundamental topic in biochemistry with in‐depth reviews of the literature enabled graduate students to learn how to effectively read and analyze the literature while learning nucleotide metabolism. A scaffoldedset of assignments, adapted with permission from B.D. Spielgelberg (2014), was created to deepen students' understanding of experimental details, interpretation of the results and development of conclusions from these results. These assignments consist of a mix of individual assessments, group‐generated analyses of figures and tables of data, and online discussions based on a peer‐reviewed paper for each section of the course. A final project, completed individually, combines these elements and is used to evaluate student progress in literature evaluation and comprehension. Examples of the assignments will be presented, as well as preliminary data demonstrating the improved performance over the semester, especially on a comprehensive analysis of a set of data or a figure from the assigned paper. Likewise, data from student evaluations will be presented to demonstrate the value of these assignments. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .