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The CURE for Cultivating Fastidious Microbes

Arundhati Bakshi, Austen T. Webber, Lorelei E. Patrick, E. William Wischusen, View ORCID ProfileJ. Cameron Thrash
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/167130
Arundhati Bakshi
Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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Austen T. Webber
Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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Lorelei E. Patrick
Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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E. William Wischusen
Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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J. Cameron Thrash
Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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  • ORCID record for J. Cameron Thrash
  • For correspondence: thrashc@lsu.edu
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ABSTRACT

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) expand scientific educational benefits of research to large groups of students through a course setting. As part of an ongoing effort to integrate CUREs into freshman biology, we developed a microbiology CURE (mCURE) that uses a modified version of a dilution-to-extinction high throughput culturing protocol for isolating abundant yet fastidious aquatic bacterioplankton. Students learn to serially dilute and inoculate microbial cultures, perform DNA extractions and PCR, and identify microbial isolates via 16S rRNA gene sequences. The curriculum also includes exercises for learning to critically read and evaluate scientific literature, and emphasizes scientific communication through written and oral exercises that incorporate social media elements. In the first three semesters, the mCUREs achieved similar cultivability success as implementation of the protocol in a standard laboratory setting. The mCURE students have cultivated 43 unique bacterioplankton taxa, many of which occur as abundant taxa in the coastal environments from which the initial inoculum was sampled. Moreover, trends observed in the pre- and post-course survey data provide preliminary evidence that the mCURE format may improve a variety of scientific training objectives, based on the students’ perceptions of the course. Our modular framework facilitates customization of the curriculum for use in multiple settings, and we provide classroom exercises, assignments, assessment tools, and examples of student output to assist with implementation.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted July 24, 2017.
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The CURE for Cultivating Fastidious Microbes
Arundhati Bakshi, Austen T. Webber, Lorelei E. Patrick, E. William Wischusen, J. Cameron Thrash
bioRxiv 167130; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/167130
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The CURE for Cultivating Fastidious Microbes
Arundhati Bakshi, Austen T. Webber, Lorelei E. Patrick, E. William Wischusen, J. Cameron Thrash
bioRxiv 167130; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/167130

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