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A growing body of literature testifies to the importance of quantitative reasoning skills
in the 21st-century biology curriculum, and to the learning benefits associated with
active pedagogies. The process of modeling a biological system provides an approach that
integrates mathematical skills and higher-order thinking with existing course content
knowledge. We describe a general strategy for teaching model-building in an introductory
biology course,...
Pharmacokinetics is an excellent way to introduce biomathematical modeling at the sophomore level. Students have the opportunity to develop a mathematical model of a biological phenomenon to which they all can relate. Exploring pharmacokinetics takes students through the necessary stages of mathematical modeling: determining the goals of the model, deciphering between the biological aspects to include in the model, defining the assumptions of the model, and finally, building, analyzing, using, and...
This paper demonstrates the development of a simple model of carbon flow during plant growth. The model was developed by six undergraduate students and their instructor as a project in a plant ecophysiology course. The paper describes the structure of the model including the equations that were used to implement it in Excel®, the plant growth experiments that were conducted to obtain information for parameterizing and testing the model, model performance, student responses to the modeling project,...
Středověká morová epidemie způsobila smrt asi 17-22 % světové populace, z toho asi 30-60 % evropské populace, a trvalo zhruba 200 let, než se světová populace vrátila na svou původní úroveň. Epidemie dnes často zmiňované španělské chřipky v letech 1918-1920 vedla ke smrti přibližně 3-5 % světové populace. Svědky méně závažných, avšak stále dramatických epidemií jsme i v současnosti. Pandemie těžkého akutního respiračního syndromu (SARS) mezi roky 2002 a 2004, pandemie prasečí chřipky způsobené kmenem...
This special issue of Mathematical Modelling of Natural Phenomena on biomathematics education shares the work of fifteen groups at as many different institutions that have developed beautiful biological applications of mathematics that are different in three ways from much of what is currently available. First, many of these selections utilize current research in biomathematics rather than the well-known textbook examples that are at least a half-century old. Second, the selections focus on modules...
We propose a novel approach to introducing hypothesis testing into the biology
curriculum. Instead of telling students the hypothesis and what kind of data to collect
followed by a rigid recipe of testing the hypothesis with a given test statistic, we ask
students to develop a hypothesis and a mathematical model that describes the null
hypothesis. Simulation of the model under the null hypothesis allows students to compare
their experimental data...
A number of exciting new laboratory techniques have been developed using the Watson-Crick complementarity properties of DNA strands to achieve the self-assembly of graphical complexes. For all of these methods, an essential step in building the self-assembling nanostructure is designing the component molecular building blocks. These design strategy problems fall naturally into the realm of graph theory. We describe graph theoretical formalism for various construction methods, and then suggest several...
Linear oscillators are used for modeling a diverse array of natural systems, for instance acoustics, materials science, and chemical spectroscopy. In this paper I describe simple models of structural interactions in biological molecules, known as elastic network models, as a useful topic for undergraduate biology instruction in mathematical modeling. These models use coupled linear oscillators to model the fluctuations of molecular structures around the equilibrium state. I present many learning...
In this paper we build and analyze networks using the statistical and programming
environment R and the igraph package. We investigate random, small-world, and scale-free
networks and test a standard problem of connectivity on a random graph. We then develop a
method to study how vaccination can alter the structure of a disease transmission network.
We also discuss a variety of other uses for networks in biology.
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