Grocery Store Based Hands-on Project in Protein Crystallography

What is it about?

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the importance of remote learning. It is difficult to adopt a lab experiment to remote learning at home due to safety concerns and the required equipment. The paper describes a method that use ingredients that are found in a grocery store and other simple tools to do crystallization of a protein at schools/home. Colored crystals of proteins are produced with food dye. This experiment is expanded as a teaching material by incorporating freely available software to teach structural biology and drug design. The paper describes various steps for teachers and students to generate their own projects involving crystallization, enzyme functional studies, and drug design.

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Why is it important?

One of the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards for K-12 education is to teach scientific practices that reflect those used by professional scientists. For high school science students, visualizing proteins and molecular-level interactions can be a major barrier to understanding biochemical concepts. This paper addresses these issues with the remote lab experiment that produce three dimensional structures of proteins and elaborate the functional aspects of protein structure. The school students can conduct experiments done by scientists at major universities/facilities. This could motivate researchers to bring other advanced scientific concepts to classrooms.

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