High school sophomores learn about science through structure.

Protein reactions are interesting. But make them glow in the dark, and wow! That's what Max Horlbeck remembers thinking as a high school student in fall 2004, as he stared at the glimmering contents of a Petri dish in Fred Hughson's biology laboratory at Princeton University.

That luminescence, Horlbeck and his classmates were told, happens when the marine bacteria in the dish communicate with each other. As sophomores, these visiting students might not have had the opportunity to spend months exploring the structure of just one protein involved in that reaction. But Horlbeck and his classmates from the nearby Pingry School, in Martinsville, New Jersey, were in luck.

They were members of Pingry School's SMART (Students Modeling a Research Topic) team. Working with the team was a winner for Hughson, a professor of molecular biology, as well. In exchange for a few hours of mentoring, spread out over several months, the students built him a sophisticated three-dimensional model of the protein, known as LuxP.

Hughson got his model, and Horlbeck and his classmates got an introduction to how high-level science works. “Knowing how to manipulate protein structure is a valuable skill,” says Horlbeck, now a junior studying biochemistry and computer science at Columbia University. “What I learned during that experience has been beneficial in nearly every lab I've worked in since.”

Sustained by positive feedback, the SMART team program has grown considerably since its launch in 2001 at the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE). It started with 10 teams based at 7 schools. Today the program runs more than 50 teams throughout the country, 18 of them funded by a precollege science education grant from HHMI. The National Institutes of Health funds the rest. Eighty percent of the SMART teams are in public schools.

“Our main goal is to introduce kids to professional science by allowing them to play a significant but peripheral role in research,” says SMART developer Tim Herman, a biochemist and molecular biologist at MSOE's Center for BioMolecular Modeling. “When you engage students in building protein models, you grab their attention and focus it in a magical way. They begin to wonder, and then ask questions, about how a protein's function and structure depend on each other.”

The SMART team experience typically begins with high school teacher training at MSOE. Over two weeks in the summer, teachers learn how to design proteins using molecular visualization software. They take those skills back to their classrooms, where they teach students how to design protein models, which are then physically created at MSOE with automated, rapid-prototyping equipment.

Illustration: Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch

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