Abstract:

Application of bioinformatics techniques become more and more important both in biological research and education. This article describes the development of a new approach (in silico lab) to teach molecular biology to undergraduate life science students who are increasingly interested in molecular biology and biotechnology due to the recent technological progress in these fields.

A set of simple exercises to do either in or outside the class has been designed to familiarize the student with various bioinformatics tools. The topics of the exercises include PubMed searches, UniProt database queries, sequence alignments, BLAST searches, DNA and protein sequence analysis, gene structure prediction, phylogenetic tree construction, protein structure visualization and analysis.

Main goal of the in silico lab lessons is to help students to solve practical biological problems also related to a research projects using bioinformatics resources and analysis tools.

The outline of the course, the main databases, analysis tools, problem examples and the demonstration projects will be presented and the teaching strategy and organization of the course will be described. Thus, the aim of this article is to give an overview of the in silico lab approach evolved from that I had previously described (Edulearn, 2017)

Recently this approach, still underway, is extended as biology long life learning for high school teachers (on MIUR platform S.O.F.I.A., the Operational System for training and updating initiatives).

The author, as wet-lab molecular biologist, self-taught computer scientist, would like to emphasize that her teaching strategy used in “in silico lab” is more biological than computational, and wishes to share experiences accumulated over the past four years and to stimulate discussion with both local and international colleagues working on bioinformatics’ education.

As a project-based and problem-orientated course, the emphasis has been put on two main areas. First, a set of predefined projects are used in the in silico lab course. These projects are mainly selected from the real research wet lab examples that the author has worked on, either in his own research projects or collaboratively with other wet-lab Academic colleagues. Second, biological problem (mapping a specific gene in different genomes find difference in chromosome number; starting from definition of open reading frame in cDNAs verify characteristics of genetic code, etc) are focused on. From the beginning to the end of each lesson.

Keywords:

Bioinformatics education, problem based learning, hands-on course, soft skills improvement, project-based learning (pbl), molecular biology long life learning.