Abstract:

Our research group of Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of León (Spain) teaches in the “Genomics” and related courses at the Master’s Degree in Biomedicine and Biotechnology Research. In the past two decades, a major shift has taken place in the field of genomics. The high-throughput genotyping tools available and the increased technical ability to sequence genetic information at large scale and at reasonable prices have allowed the routine implementation of genome-wide association analysis (GWAS), exome and genome sequencing to genetic studies. This has enabled the identification of proven associations between genomic loci and phenotypic traits of interest, in both humans and livestock species. In addition, the need of making sense of the vast amount of genomic information generated has determined the close relationship between genomics and the evolving science of bioinformatics. Considering all this, one of the big challenges of higher education courses addressing genomics related topics relies in showing the students, in a simplified way, how genomics can provide answers to certain problems by integrating information from different sources and methodologies and by applying different bioinformatic workflows. This is also needed to ensure that future professionals in medicine or veterinary will be able to integrate genomics into daily diagnostic or clinical applications. In attempt to deal with this challenge when training students in the previously mentioned courses, we have developed an interactive problem-based learning landscape using the Genially platform. This allowed us to generate an immersive learning environment for the students to an attractive genomic study by exploiting a gamification strategy. The interactive presentation is offered to the students as a test-case where they are considered the researchers in charge of identifying the gene and the causal mutation of an ovine hereditary disease (lissencephaly with cerebellar hypoplasia). After the presentation of the case-problem, the students are presented the different decision-making steps that a researcher would need to do to integrate the different sources of information with the objective of identifying the causal mutation of the studied disease. The different steps in the immersive process are based on a published article by our research group and allow the student to select among the different genomic methodologies (GWAS, High-throughput and Sanger sequencing, Variant identification, Functional validation and Genetic/phenotypic ocncordance testing), and also interact with publicly available databases related to genomic repositories and scientific literature. After running the presentation, and through a voluntary survey, the involved students informed about their feeling on getting introduced into integrative genomic research scientific reasoning through this interactive gamification tool. In summary this case-report shows how interactive problem-based learning landscapes can be used to promote active learning and student´s engagement which are required to ensure the students gain a global understanding of complex integrative topics such as current genomic studies.

Keywords:

Genomics, problem-based learning, interactive landscapes, gamification, scientific reasoning.