Multi-directional evolution: the ELLS TeachingBASE is growing!

If you are looking for a place of innovative, ready-made teaching resources for the biology classroom, look no further than the ELLS TeachingBASE. Our collection of teaching modules produced by EMBL scientists and ELLS education specialists feature both practical classroom activities as well as computational modules – and it is growing continuously! The latest additions are two resources centring around the use of bioinformatics in school:

GFP treasure hunt

This resource features the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) as its protein of choice. Multiple activity steps introduce students to bioinformatics databases and tools used to identify and analyse DNA and protein sequences. In the first part, students identify several genes based on their DNA sequences and learn about sequence alignment. After translating mRNA into amino acid sequences, students then compare different amino acid sequences with each other and analyse the tertiary structure of GFP.

Exploring the evolution of light-sensitive proteins

In this activity, students utilise a variety of bioinformatic tools and database to explore the evolution of rhodopsin and rhodopsin-related proteins. In multiple steps, students learn how to identify an unknown protein based on its primary structure and how to align multiple amino acid sequences. Based on the sequence alignment, students then create a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary relatedness. In a complementary part of the activity, students may explore the secondary and tertiary structure of opsin proteins.

Multilingual resources

Thanks to our enthusiastic volunteer translators, both new resources are now available in English, Czech, French, Italian, and Greek. Many of the ELLS TeachingBASE resources are available in languages other than English, too. You can explore the ELLS TeachingBASE here.

We are always looking to increase our pool of volunteer translators. So, if you would like to see your favourite ELLS TeachingBASE resource translated into your native language, we would be delighted to hear from you by email.