ERP Peak Detective: Introduction to Event-Related Potential Analysis with MATLAB part of Teaching Computation with MATLAB:Past Workshops:MATLAB Workshop 2025:Activities
This scaffolded laboratory activity introduces students with minimal programming experience to Event-Related Potential (ERP) analysis using MATLAB. Students progress from interactive visual exploration of neural ...

Lake Mixing Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Stratified lakes exhibit vertical gradients in organisms, nutrients, and oxygen, which have important implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Mixing disrupts these gradients by redistributing these ...

Paleoclimate and Ocean Biogeochemistry part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
This module guides students through an examination of how surface ocean productivity relates to global climate on glacial-interglacial timescales and how the availability of ocean nutrients can be correlated with ...

Water Quality Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Water quality is a critical concept for undergraduate students studying Earth Sciences, Biology, and Environmental Sciences. Many of these students will be asked to assess the impacts of a proposed anthropogenic ...

Characterizing the Aging Process Using Caenorhabditis elegans and Reverse Genetics part of CUREnet:Institutes:Community College of Rhode island:Examples
Using gene silencing (RNAi) in the nemotode C. elegans, students will identify genetic modifiers of proteins with roles in aging by reverse genetics. Specifically, students will analyze the effect of knocking down genes on the level of aging-related proteins tagged with fluorophores (GFP, RFP, etc.). Each group of students will use function-specific RNAi libraries (transcription factors, kinases, etc) already established in our lab. Furthermore, students will evaluate the effect of genetic modifiers on proteostasis and lifespan. In addition to becoming familiar with C. elegans work and appreciating the use of model organisms, the students will master microscopy, genetic crosses, gene silencing, and molecular and biochemical readout assays such as qPCR and immunoblotting.

Assessing the Risk of Invasive Species Using Community Science Data part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
This module introduces students who are already familiar with GIS to doing comparative analyses with large-scale community science (often called citizen science) data sets. Students will explore how we can use ...

An Arabidopsis Mutant Screen CURE for a Cell and Molecular Biology Laboratory Course part of CUREnet:CURE Collection
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.

Wind and Ocean Ecosystems part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Wind has a fundamental impact on ocean ecosystems. Wind drives physical processes, including current development and upwelling through Ekman transport. These physical processes, in turn, have cascading impacts on ...

Using Ecological Forecasts to Guide Decision Making part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Because of increased variability in populations, communities, and ecosystems due to land use and climate change, there is a pressing need to know the future state of ecological systems across space and time. ...

Nutrient Monitoring in the Chesapeake Bay part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
The Chesapeake Bay waters receive input from rivers and streams from areas of Washington D.C, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, and some parts of New York and Pennsylvania. Historically, humongous ...

Nutrient Loading Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Estimating nutrient loads is a critical concept for students studying water quality in a variety of environmental settings. Many STEM/Environmental science students will be asked to assess the impacts of a proposed anthropogenic activities on human water resources and/or ecosystems as part of their future careers. This module engages students in exploring factors contributing to the actual loads of nitrogen that are transmitted down streams. Nitrogen is a key water quality contaminant contributing to surface water quality issues in fresh, salt, and estuarine environments. Students will utilize real-time nitrate data from the US Geological Survey to calculate nitrate loads for several locations and investigate the interplay of concentration and discharge that contributes to calculated loads.

Capstone Project Stage 1 part of Future of Food
The goal of the Future Food Scenarios capstone project is for the students to investigate the food systems in a particular region in depth, and in particular to identify the current situation, determine the ...

Modeling Rare Plant Distributions Using ArcGIS part of Teach the Earth:Teaching Activities
In this activity, students work with rare plant occurrence data from the Nature Reserve of Orange County, California to create species distribution maps in ArcGIS. Students are given shapefiles of species ...

Botany Field Observations part of E-STEM:Field Course:ESTEM-PD Activities
Plants form the link between the abiotic features of landscape (rock, soils, water, etc.) and the biotic world. California has a very rich and complex flora, making species identification sometimes very difficult. ...

Organismal Form and Function Lab part of CUREnet:CURE Collection
Invertebrates use movement of their bodies and structures in diverse ways to interact with their environment. This includes general locomotion (e.g., walking, jumping, flying) to specific forms of locomotion (e.g., gliding on water), using limbs to acquire food (e.g., raptorial forelegs in the praying mantis) and using structures to communicate (e.g., cricket calls). These movements have been the focus of bioinspiration studies to understand how these small organisms, with compact nervous systems, are able to achieve their movements. Given the diversity of invertebrates and the lack of information on the variation in their movements, the goals of this course are to understand the variation in invertebrate movement and explore the factors that may affect that variation. In this course, students have the opportunity to develop and test their own research hypotheses associated with variation in the movement of invertebrates. Using high-speed cameras, students are instructed on filming techniques to quantify animal movement, the use of the R programming language to obtain basic kinematics of movement and analyze their data, and the process of science from hypothesis formation to presentation of results. Research questions change each iteration based upon the hypotheses students develop, but the same instructional material and skillsets (e.g., quantifying animal movement) are consistently used. Results from each student group are presented during a departmental wide poster symposium and can be written up for publication, where applicable.

Design2Data part of CUREnet:Institutes:Other Institutes (2019-2020):Examples
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.

Procrustes Skull Analysis part of Teaching Computation with MATLAB:Past Workshops:MATLAB Workshop October 2022:Activities
Procrustes analysis is a form of statistical shape analysis used to analyze the distribution of a set of shapes. The goal of this assignment is to compare different skull types to a reference skull to determine ...

Climate Drivers of Phenology part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Many species' life cycles are strongly influenced by temperature, but other cues, like day length and precipitation, can also trigger life cycle changes. Phenology is a way of recording the time when events, ...

Lake Metabolism Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Different lakes exhibit a range of catchment sizes, morphometry, and land use that contribute to differences in lake function. These functional differences mean that lakes vary in ecosystem services such as habitat ...

Isolation and characterization of antibiotic-producing soil bacteria part of CUREnet:Institutes:NC Central University:Examples
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.