|
Dr. Danielle
Gray, Deputy Director for the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience
and faculty in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, Emory worked
on developments for her freshman seminar course, The Forgotten Brain:
Alzheimer's Disease.
This seminar course introduces students to environmental
and genetic factors that predispose humans to AD and motivates students
to learn neuroanatomy. She developed an instructional website and
digital sheep-human brain atlas and used it in her class as it was
being developed. She also designed a digital, comparative human-sheep
brain atlas. To ensure that the "neurolab immersion" provides an
accurate depiction of the complexities of the human brain, she has
developed a digital, comparative atlas in which highlighting a given
region within the sheep brain outlines the parallel structure in
the human brain and displays its function and connections in a field
below the image. The atlas will be made available to the Emory community
via her website (http://nbb.emory.edu/GRAY/my_work.htm).
Danielle plans to have students study environmental
and genetic factors predisposing humans to AD, using the Bioquest
Workbench, and requiring students to "mine" for the human APP gene
and its murine homolog. The primary objectives of this module will
be a) to give students an appreciation for the impact of the protein
sequence on the solubility of beta-amyloid and b) to introduce students
to the rapidly growing field of Bioinformatics. In general, this
module will instruct students to determine and record the differences
between the murine and human APP genes. After this exercise, students
will be given a series of articles that espouse various hypotheses
for the formation of beta-amyloid plaques. From these readings and
based on the sequences, students will be instructed to enter an
hypothesis stating whether the differences in protein structure
account for plaque concentration differences in human versus rat
brain. Students will then test whether the hypotheses constructed
hold true for rodents and primates in general.
"Intriguingly, this Hughes-sponsored neuroanatomy
immersion resonated well with students. More than 90% of the students
ranked the sheep brain dissection exercises along with the supplemental
materials made available through the Hughes-sponsored website as
the apex of the course and an excellent way to learn general neuroanatomy.
Overall, the Hughes/ECIT workshop enabled me to meet my greatest
challenge for this course, finding effective means to integrate
the excitement of neuroscience into our classroom environment. And,
because of this, I am sincerely thankful."
|
