Undergraduate Biophysical Chemistry Series: Teaching through a Combination of a Purpose-built Textbook, Research-derived Biomolecular Samples and Computer Labs
Biophysics is a rapidly advancing field with an incredible breadth of topics. Thus, undergraduate biophysics instructors have to strategize and decide what topics they will cover in their courses. Educational institutions utilize a variety of biophysics textbooks. A common deficiency of each of the existing texts is that it serves well a given set of topics (theory, illustrations, practice problems) and leaves out other areas. A typical example includes good theory and problems for thermodynamics and kinetics while presenting molecular dynamics and various spectroscopic methods in a lacking or outdated way. The authors of this manuscript teach a capstone Biophysical Chemistry three-quarter series (Western Washington University/WWU, Bellingham, WA) which ideally should resonate with the general and major-specific courses the students take within their major at WWU. To achieve this goal and to enrich the traditional lecture-based delivery, the instructors have developed and brought together key pedagogical elements: purpose-built online textbook with a uniform structure of the academic content and practice problems, a study sample (oligopeptide) of biophysical significance with a growing set of experimental and computational data and student-centric in-class activities including computer labs. Our Biophysical series emphasizes concepts and methods of computational structural biology (Molecular Dynamics) and spectroscopic approaches (IR, UV and NMR). Here we describe the details of our integrative approach, summarize key outcomes and chart ways to advance the biophysical chemistry series further. Our textbook can be found through LibreText.