An Arabidopsis Mutant Screen CURE for a Cell and Molecular Biology Laboratory Course
Jinjie Liu, Michigan State University
This CURE is designed from a crucial component of a chloroplast lipid signaling research project and has been implemented for a cell and molecular biology laboratory course at Michigan State University. The research laboratory generated an engineered plant line producing a lipid-derived plant hormone and mutagenized this line. The research question is "what transporters or receptors are involved in the hormone signaling transduction or perception processes?". Students form research hypotheses based on the research model, design experiments, perform experiments, collect and analyze data, make scientific arguments, and share their findings with the learning community. Specifically, the students culture the mutagenized plant population and select the desired mutant phenotypes, followed by genotyping the mutants and characterizing the mutants by basic biochemical approaches. Mathematics is also integrated into the course design. As the students studied the relevant genetic, molecular and biochemical concepts during this CURE, they use the core idea of information flow and data they generate in the lab to make claims about their mutant plants and support these claims with evidence and reasoning.

Population & Community Ecology
Cascade Sorte, University of California-Irvine
Students in a Population and Community Ecology class participate in coastal marine research focused on understanding factors determining population sizes and community interactions, particularly in the context of species that appear to be shifting their ranges with climate change. Students participate in all aspects of the research from making observations and collecting data in the field to defining questions, stating hypothesis, designing and completing statistical analysis, and interpreting and presenting results. The outcomes are a research proposal, research paper, and poster presentation. All are intended to be at a level appropriate for use as a writing sample or presentation at undergraduate conferences. Results are incorporated into the ongoing research project led by the course instructor and graduate student teaching assistant.

Molecular Parasitology
Swati Agrawal, University of Mary Washington
In Spring 2021, we piloted a mini-CURE where student groups from University of Mary Washington and Georgia State University collaboratively completed research projects as part of a research-intensive course on Molecular Parasitology. The benefits of this approach were immediately obvious as students interacted across institutions, learned from each other's disciplinary expertise while informing their own research with data collected by their collaborators.

Biochemistry II lab: Crithidia parasite metabolism
Amy Greene, Albright College
Course Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) have been shown to increase student engagement, skills, and retention in STEM. We developed a CURE using non-pathogenic Crithidia fasciculata parasites, which are insect trypanosomes related to the causative agents of Leishmaniasis, African Trypanosomiasis, and Chagas' diseases. This parasite is ideal for undergraduate CUREs because it grows to high density in serum-free inexpensive media, and has not been well studied in the literature, providing opportunities for novel discoveries. Metabolically labelled 1-13C-glucose was added to the parasites, and changes in peak position was monitored over time (either in real time, or in the supernatant). The main fermentation products observed were ethanol and succinate. Student groups then designed a novel project investigating metabolism in Crithidia. Students produced novel data on metabolism in a little-studied parasite.

MCC: Malate Dehydrogenase CUREs Community
Ellis Bell, University of San Diego
The Malate Dehydrogenase CUREs Community (MCC) project is designed to facilitate the adoption of effective, protein‐centric, Course Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) into teaching labs at a wide variety of undergraduate serving institutions. (Primarily Undergraduate Institutions, Research Intensive Universities and Community Colleges) MCC coordinates and conducts pedagogical research into two major features of CUREs:1) their duration (whole semester versus 5‐6 week modules incorporated into a lab class), and 2) the impact of scientific collaboration between institutions (a key aspect of much modern research). Using validated assessment tools we seek to establish their effects on student confidence, persistence in STEM, and ability to design research experiments and interprete data. To facilitate faculty adoption of CURE approaches the project provides a number of resources. These focus on a variety of research areas related to Malate Dehydrogenase including mechanisms of catalysis and regulation, adaptation and evolution, cofactor specificity, folding and stability and interactions in metabolons. Resources include biologics, experimental protocols and assessment tools. The project also coordinates interactions between courses at different institutions to allow incorporation of scientific collaboration into CUREs. These collaborations also facilitate the use of more sophisticated experimental approaches and broaden the experimental scope of the CUREs.

Isolation and characterization of antibiotic-producing soil bacteria
Maria Messner, Lenoir Community College
One of the biggest threat in hospitals is the rising cases of people who harbor antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. Therefore, it is critical to find and characterize novel antibiotics to combat the resistant strains. Most of the antibiotics used in healthcare settings come from anti-biotic producing bacteria and fungi found in the soil. The goal of this CURE will be to isolate antibiotic-producing bacteria and fungi from the soil in the local area, and to determine the chemistry of the antibiotics. An extension of the project will be to determine how the presence of antibiotic-producing microbes affect other organisms resident in the soil, as it is unclear as to why microbes use energy to produce antibiotic factors.

Analyzing datasets in ecology and evolution to teach the nature and process of science
Rebecca Price, University of Washington-Tacoma Campus
This quarter-long project forms the basis of a third-year course for majors and nonmajors at the University of Washington, Bothell called Science Methods and Practice. Students use databases to identify novel research questions, and extract data to test their hypotheses. They frame the question with primary literature, address the questions with inferential statistics, and discuss the results with more primary literature. The product is a scientific paper; each step of the process is scaffolded and evaluated. Given time limitations, we avoid devoting time to data collection; instead, we sharpen students' ability to make sense of a large body of quantitative data, a situation they may rarely have encountered. We treat statistics with a strictly conceptual, pragmatic, and abbreviated approach; i.e., we ask students to know which basic test to choose to assess a linear relationship vs. a difference between two means. We stress the need for a normal distribution in order to use these tests, and how to interpret the results; we leave the rest for stats courses, and we do not teach the mathematics. This approach proves beneficial even to those who have already had a statistics course, because it is often the first time they make decisions about applying statistics to their own research questions. We incorporate peer review and collaborative work throughout the quarter. We form collaborative groups around the research questions they ask, enabling them to share primary literature they find, and preparing them well to review each other's writing. We encourage them to cite each other's work. They write formal peer reviews of each other's papers, and they submit their final paper with a letter-to-the-editor highlighting how their research has addressed previous feedback. A major advantage of this course is that an instructor can easily modify it to suit any area of expertise. Students have worked with data about how a snail's morphology changes in response to its environment (Price, 2012), how students understand genetic drift (Price et al. 2014), maximum body size in the fossil record (Payne et al. 2008), range shifts (Ettinger et al. 2011), and urban crop pollination (Waters and Clifford 2014).

Biomass conversion into highly useful chemicals
SAPNA JAIN, Alabama State University
This is CURE based course that aims at bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge in chemistry and its practical applications at solving real-world problems. It gives students an opportunity to construct and synthesize their knowledge and skills by learning to apply theoretical knowledge to practice by the laboratory research. The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with the fundamental concepts of chemistry, synthetic methods and techniques. The emphasis will be on novel catalysts synthesis and evaluating their activity towards biomass conversion to liquid fuel and useful chemicals. Students will design synthesize, deduce identities of the biomass conversion products from chemical and spectral clues, and predict reaction products.

Design2Data
Ashley Vater, University of California-Davis
The D2D program is centered around an undergraduate-friendly protocol workflow that follows the design-build-test-learn engineering framework. This protocol has served as the scaffold for a successful undergraduate training program and has been further developed into courses that range from a 10-week freshman seminar to a year-long, upper-division molecular biology course. The overarching research goal of this CURE probes the current predictive limitations of protein-modeling software by functionally characterizing single amino acid mutants in a robust model system. The most interesting outcomes of this project are dependent on large datasets, and, as such, the project is optimal for multi-institutional collaborations.

Analysis of the effects of protein-protein interactions on signaling through a team-based undergraduate biochemistry laboratory course
Daniela Fera, Swarthmore College
We developed a research-based laboratory course centered on a biological problem involving the B-Raf kinase, specifically the mutant that is commonly found in melanomas. One of the major goals of the project for the students is to generate mutants to determine whether a particular region of the B-Raf protein is critical for the interaction with MEK kinase, a downstream target in the pathway. Students analyze the published B-Raf-MEK crystal structure and choose a mutation to generate in B-Raf or MEK that might alter the dissociation constant (KD) of the complex. They design primers, perform PCR to generate their desired mutant, transform and purify the resulting DNA, express the DNA in E. coli, and purify the protein, all before characterizing it. Characterizing the mutant proteins consist of performing basic pull-downs, western blots, spectroscopic absorbance assays, and biolayer interferometry for binding kinetics. Students also engage in group meeting presentations and journal clubs in which they discuss their work and related primary literature, respectively. Group meeting and journal club discussions provide a forum for students to come up with new ideas to analyze their results, or for future work. Students summarize key results in a final presentation and paper, and develop a research proposal based on their work. Data that students obtain from their mutants provide evidence of the importance of a binding region for B-Raf-MEK complex formation, as well as downstream phosphorylation events. Such data will inform future drug discovery programs, as well as form the foundation for students' work in the course the following year. Because working with mutants can result in unpredictable data and results, students sometimes have to adjust their protocols and repeat experiments. Thus, the CURE format of this course also gives students an opportunity to learn to troubleshoot when things do not work as expected, which helps them learn resiliency in science.