An Introduction to Chemical Thinking Through the Lens of Antimalarial Drug Design
An Introduction to Chemical Thinking: Through the Lens of Antimalarial Drug Design
This CURE is taught in a standard 4 hour lab taught once a week throughout the semester (14 weeks. Each class during the semester has components focused on a) the project and b) foundational concepts of introductory chemistry that they see in the separate lecture sections. The project was designed to satisfy the standard Chemistry Lab Learning Goals that all sections of General Chemistry Lab address. The CURE project, threaded throughout the semester, features all the standard elements of a CURE, Relevance, Scientific Background, Hypothesis Development, A Proposal, Experiments & Teamwork, Data Collection and Reproducibility, Data Analysis and evidence based conclusions, and a formal presentation of the overall project as well as Peer Review..
In this CURE section students gain both technical expertise & research experience through the lens of Antimalarial Drug Design. During the semester they develop and present a research project proposal including relevance, scientific background, and hypothesis development. They design and perform experiments using a variety of classic chemistry techniques (titration, kinetics, spectroscopy, molecular modeling) in the context of experiments to explore structure function relationships of potential antimalarial drugs targeted towards a specific enzyme, Malate Dehydrogenase. Students will develop and test research ideas related to novel approaches to target the parasite but not the human host. Based on appropriate data analysis they select key experiments to repeat to establish reproducibility, allowing them to draw evidence based conclusions. At the end of the semester they present all aspects of their project in a final presentation. Each of the three presentations in the course includes peer review and revision prior to the graded presentations and students are provided with extensive rubrics for each presentation.
Student Goals
Students will appreciate what a good research project entails and will develop approaches to develop a novel hypothesis and present a proposal for their project
Students will learn how to design and execute experiments to test their hypothesis, will learn appropriate data analysis approaches and will appreciate the importance of accurate documentation of their work and reproducibility of their experiments.
To develop a description of their research project in written, poster or a slide presentation suitable for verbal presentation
Research Goals
To develop ideas for potential lead compounds that can distinguish between pathogen and host homologs of a potentail drug target
To initiate potential approaches for optimizing the potential of such lead compounds to increase their suitability as candidates for potential future drug design