An Activity for Cell Biology Course to Implement Active Learning

Practices involving active learning engage students in doing activities that develop their understanding and higher order thinking in a lecture or laboratory course. The activities promote students’ skill due to their dynamic participation in problem solving process through application of scientific principles, research techniques and tools. This article introduces a design of a class activity ideal for a Cell Biology course taught virtually or in-person. The activity includes training to retrieve sequence of a protein of interest from a database, feeding the sequence in freely available online bioinformatic tools that predict protein localization followed by a set of analytical questions to assess the structure and function of the protein. Practice of this inquiry-driven activity in a classroom can be extremely valuable for its practical use in research with novel proteins.

Keywords: Cell biology; Active learning; Protein localization; DeepLoc-1.0; SignalP-5.0; TargetP-2.0