Borrowing a little from research to enhance undergraduate teaching

Faculty members in typical teaching and research universities constantly feel pulled in three different directions -teaching, research and service. These constant demands and tug-of-war often leads us to unfortunately "cut corners" and not take our teaching as seriously and instead make us focus on our research activities. However, with a little bit of work and creativity, it is possible that we can "borrow a little from our various research activities to enhance our undergraduate teaching". This poster will present three examples where the author has taken basic elements of three different biochemistry research projects and incorporated them into his undergraduate biochemistry laboratory classes. This not only gives students the opportunity to see latest topics in the faculty members' research but to also see how chemistry (or biochemistry) actually addresses real-world issues and concerns. The three topics deal with 1) using GFP to study protein denaturation, 2) using Alkaline Phosphatase assays to study basic enzyme kinetics, and 3) use of Advanced Oxidation Processes to degrade organic pollutants. Experimental set-ups of each of these three undergraduate experiments will be presented in detail.