How small changes in a protein can have large impacts on human health

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, STEM clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 biology.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Dr Dongyan Tan, a structural biologist at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, USA. She is investigating how variations in histone proteins result in changes to chromatin and therefore to DNA damage repair pathways.

• This resource also contains an interview with Dongyan, and with Harry, an undergraduate student working in her lab, and offers an insight into careers in structural biology. If your students have questions for Dongyan or Harry, they can send them to them online. All they need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Dongyan and Harry will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Dongyan’s research and challenges them to imagine what it would be like to work in a research lab, like Harry.

• The article and activity sheet are also available in Spanish through the weblink below.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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