Metabolic minimap of anaerobic digestion for undergraduate biochemistry courses

Abstract

As a representative catabolic reaction that widely exists in nature, anaerobic digestion (AD) exhibits great value regarding the global carbon cycle, renewable energy development, and environmental protection. Such an important biochemical reaction was ignored before and should be introduced into the teaching and textbooks of undergraduate biochemistry courses. However, students may face obstructions when learning AD theories since the metabolic pathways in AD are very complex. To solve these problems, an instructive metabolic minimap of the AD reaction was designed, including its reaction stages, reaction pathways, substrates, and enzymes. Furthermore, the interrelationships between aerobic catabolism (AEC) and anaerobic catabolism (ANC) were also summarized by combining the catabolic pathways of typical biological macromolecules. In this paper, AD theories were first replenished into undergraduate biochemistry courses by metabolic minimap, which not only provided valuable supports for the practical teaching of AD in undergraduate biochemistry courses, but also acted as an important reference for students in biology‐related majors and biochemistry teachers.

Development of a Bite-Sized Visual Interactive Study Aid for Carbohydrate Metabolism

“…In the past, there have been teaching aids that helped students understand metabolic pathways in different ways. − The authors developed a courseware, the Metabolism Metro, which aimed to stimulate students’ interest in exploring human metabolic pathways. We used metro lines to represent metabolic pathways and train stations to represent the metabolites involved in the pathways.…”