| dc.description.abstract | A project-oriented laboratory course has been designed to introduce students to the study of biochemistry as it is practiced. The course is designed to be a capstone experience for students enrolled in a variety of majors at the Rochester Institute of Technology, including those who enter our new B.S. Biochemistry program. The experiments in this course enable the students to explore the protein chemistry, enzymology, and molecular biology of a single enzyme, threonine dehydrogenase, in a series of integrated experiments. The laboratory incorporates both traditional methods (centrifugation, UV-vis spectroscopy, gel electrophoresis, and chromatography) and more recent developments in the field (polymerase chain reaction). Students use a small computer network to prepare for experiments (using simulation software developed at RIT), to evaluate data, to access sequence homology databases over the Internet, and to visualize and model proteins and nucleic acids. The change in the biochemistry teaching lab from a sequence of unrelated experiments to an integrated series of experiments is a model that can be readily adapted by other educators, who can change their courses to focus on a single enzyme with which they are most familiar. | en_US |
