Motivating and Shaping Scientific Argumentation in Lab Reports.

Writing a lab report can be an opportunity for students to engage in scientific thinking. Yet students' lab reports often do not exhibit evidence of such engagement. Students' writing can appear focused on "filling in" required components and reporting on predetermined conclusions.

Expanding Research on Responsive Teaching.

Over a decade of theoretical and empirical research, primarily in K-12 mathematics and science education, makes the case for the benefits of responsive teaching-an approach to instruction that centralizes student thinking. The new research described in this provides quantitative support for the benefits of responsiveness, interrogates how responsive teaching is conceptualized and practiced to support equity, and invites the biology education research community to consider how to make responsive teaching more common at the undergraduate level.

Interproton distance determinations by NOE--surprising accuracy and precision in a rigid organic molecule.

The accuracy inherent in the measurement of interproton distances in small molecules by nuclear Overhauser enhancement (NOE) and rotational Overhauser enhancement (ROE) methods is investigated with the rigid model compound strychnine. The results suggest that interproton distances can be established with a remarkable level of accuracy, within a few percent of their true values, using a straight-forward data analysis method if experiments are conducted under conditions that support the initial rate approximation. Dealing with deviations from these conditions and other practical issues regarding these measurements are discussed.

A scenario-based approach to modeling development: a prototype model of C. elegans vulval fate specification.

Studies of developmental biology are often facilitated by diagram "models" that summarize the current understanding of underlying mechanisms. The increasing complexity of our understanding of development necessitates computational models that can extend these representations to include their dynamic behavior. Here we present a prototype model of Caenorhabditis elegans vulval precursor cell fate specification that represents many processes crucial for this developmental event but that are hard to integrate using other modeling methodologies.

Inhibition of micro-RNA-induced RNA silencing by 2'-o-methyl oligonucleotides in Drosophila S2 cells.

More than 90 different micro-ribonucleic acid (miRNA) encoding genes have been identified in Drosophila, yet the function of only two of these, bantam and DmiR-14, has been elucidated. In an effort to develop a general strategy for the analysis of miRNA function in Drosophila, two procedures were developed, in a Schneider line 2 cell culture system, which may be adapted to that end. First, we show that endogenous miRNAs can partially inhibit the expression of a transiently transfected reporter gene that has been modified to contain sequences complementary to that miRNA in the 3' UTR of a target messenger RNA (mRNA).