ADI Brian

I want to test standard 33210.4.8 Determine the relationship between mutations and human genetic disorders for my ADI project.

Step 1: Identification of the task: I will use sickle cell anemia to introduce the concept of mutations and genetic disorders. Student should have some general concept about heredity, genes, and some idea about certain diseases are caused by foreign agents versus diseases passed down from generations. From this, we can identity the problems as: What does it mean when a human disease is genetic? What makes it genetic? How does change in genetic sequence leads to change in expression?

Step 2: The generation of data: For this part, I plan to use several different types of activity to answer the questions. First, I will use a simple codon-translation activity to have students figure the amino acid sequence when given a nucleotide sequence. By this point students should have learned about the genetic code and how its ultimate goal in producing proteins. Then, I will use a very simple wire activity, which was developed at the university level, to model the folding of proteins. Simply put, students will make loops of different sizes on a wire to simulate hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and neutral amino acids, and then attempt to wrap it together to model how protein folding is affected by amino acid properties.

Step 3: Production of a tentative argument: From the previous data generation step, students should be able to see a clear connection between nucleotide sequence, amino acid, sequence, and protein shape. Students will then develop their idea of how mutations in the nucleotide sequence might lead to a change in shape, and thereby function.

Step 4: Interactive argument session: For this step, students are encouraged to develop their ideas about genetic diseases. By this point most of them have a good idea about how protein shape could be affected by mutations. Thus, for this step, my goal is to help students explore about the other possibilities that mutations cause disease. Is shape the only thing affected? How about levels of expression? Since it starts in the genetic code, how does it get passed from generation to generation? A lot of arguments can be developed here.

Step 5-7: Students will create their own report to summarize all their findings and arguments, and share it with each other for critiques and revision.

Step 8:  I will gather all students for to go over what we did. I will also introduce the concept of allele frequency for the next project. I think allele frequency is the next logical sequence for the unit and ties it very well to step 4.