The Spine Lab: A Short-Duration, Fully-Remote Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience.

ABSTRACT: Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are increasingly common approaches to provide students with authentic laboratory experiences. Typically, CUREs are semester-long, in-person experiences that can be financially and time prohibitive for some institutions, faculty, and students. Here, we developed a short-duration, fully-online CURE, the Spine Lab, to provide an opportunity for students to conduct original research. In this CURE, we focused on synaptic spines in the mammalian brain; synapses are the unit structure that functions in rapid information processing. The students worked together in pairs and as a class to analyze cortical neuron spine density and structural morphology changes between a mouse line with learning impairments (forebrain-specific β-catenin knockout

SUBMITTER: Wickham RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9053429 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature