Modeling Interdisciplinary Collaborations Through a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE)

Interdisciplinary collaborations are often essential to answer multi-faceted questions, yet they present with many challenges such as understanding the information, methodologies, and norms of another field and effective communication between team members. We must begin to provide young scientists with the skills necessary for success as the call for more interdisciplinary science expands. We have modelled an interdisciplinary collaboration at the undergraduate level through a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). Students in upper-level Biochemistry and Structural Biology courses collaborated to assign functions to proteins “of unknown function” in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The Structural Biology students used bioinformatics tools including the ProMOL plugin to the PyMOL molecular graphics environment, along with BLAST, Pfam, and Dali to predict protein functions. In parallel, the Biochemistry students expressed and purified the proteins and carried out in vitro testing, informed by t...