Eleven
Pectobacterium
strains were isolated from soft rot-diseased vegetables. Here, we report their genome sequences and characteristics. Five isolates were found to be
Pectobacterium versatile
, while the other six were determined to be
Pectobacterium brasiliense
.
Two
Pseudomonas
strains (SR17 and SR18) were isolated from soft rot-diseased spinach leaves. Here, we report their genome sequences and characteristics.
Antibiotic Resistance (ABR) is a global concern and while many students are aware of this issue, many of them are unclear on the mechanisms by which ABR may emerge. The mechanism of horizontal gene transfer is something many students are not familiar with.
Genetics plays an increasing role in modern life as evidenced by the development of revolutionary techniques such as CRISPR-based genome editing and the rise of personalized genome services. However, genetics is difficult to learn; known issues include its abstract nature, different scales, and technical language. Pedigree analysis is a convergence of these concepts, requiring use of multiple symbolic scales and understanding the relationships and nature of alleles, genes, and chromosomes. To measure student understanding of these concepts, as well as support biology educational reform toward student-centered instruction, we developed a formative assessment to provide reliable and valid evidence of student understanding, learning, and misconceptions for pedigree analysis. Nine multiple choice items targeted to four learning objectives were developed in an iterative process with faculty and student input. We designed distractor answers to capture common student misconceptions and deployed a novel statistical technique to assess the congruence of distractor language with targeted misconceptions. Psychometric analysis showed the instrument provides valid and reliable data and has utility to measure normalized learning gains. Finally, we employed cross-tabulation and distractor progression to identify several stable misconceptions that can be targeted for instructional intervention.
Genetics is a difficult topic for undergraduate biology students to comprehend because the topics are abstract, complex, use specific terminology, and require thinking across multiple scales, including the symbolic scale. Education regarding the most basic genetics concepts begins in mid‐elementary grades with distinct concepts repeated and built upon through high school. However, students also transfer information from popular culture and through making their own meaning of observed phenomena. Therefore, when students arrive to a genetics course, they have pre‐instructional knowledge about genetics topics some of which are misconceptions and/or naïve conceptions. The aim of this project was to investigate common misconceptions and naïve conceptions in undergraduate courses for pedigree analysis. Pedigree analysis is a common tool that involves thinking across the symbolic scale, distinct terminology, and the application of Mendelian and non‐Mendelian genetic principles. Open‐ended questions were used to gather student answers for three distinct learning objectives. Student answers were analyzed and grouped according to each student's conceptual errors. Terminology, the ability to gather the appropriate information from questions, and the symbolic nature of pedigree analysis were major problems for students and represent major, cross‐cutting problems with many genetics concepts. In addition, students' answers also revealed problems with understanding autosomal versus sex‐linked inheritance as well as confusion about the nature and relationship of genes and alleles. Furthermore, some students used reasoning associated with population level genetics, which shows a lack of understanding about mathematical probability and its relationship to inheritance for an individual. Future studies aim to utilize these data to investigate a schema theory approach to formation and organization of conceptual understanding for pedigree analysis.Support or Funding InformationNSF Award : 1710262This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
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