Although teaching laboratories offer students the opportunity to act and think like chemists, in many cases students simply follow written procedures to generate predetermined outcomes. In recent years, there has been a movement toward inquiry-, problem-, and discovery-based learning. In a similar vein, the first-semester introductory organic…

University of Michigan--Dearborn offers a one semester, two credit, stand-alone Organic Chemistry Laboratory course aimed at students with an interest in health-related careers. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a campus closure and a subsequent transition to a partially remote laboratory curriculum developed on-the-fly for the Winter 2020 semester…

The separation of chamazulene from hydrophilic contaminants present in blue tansy oil provides a visually engaging example of two common techniques: extraction and thin-layer chromatography (TLC). This application uses liquid CO[subscript 2] as a lipophilic solvent to pull a brilliant blue hydrocarbon molecule, chamazulene, out of or through a…

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) strongly recommends that "science be taught as science is practiced." This means that the teaching approach must be consistent with the nature of scientific inquiry. In this article, the authors describe how they added scientific inquiry to a large lecture-based physiology…

The earthworm is ideal for studying action potential conduction velocity in a classroom setting, as its simple linear anatomy allows easy axon length measurements and the worm's sparse coding allows single action potentials to be easily identified. The earthworm has two giant fiber systems (lateral and medial) with different conduction velocities…

Chapter 1: The role of cell division in protein expression is important to understand in order to guide the development of better nonviral gene delivery materials that can transport DNA to the nucleus with high efficiency for a variety of cell types, particularly when nondividing cells are targets of gene therapy. We evaluated the relationship…