“We use a modified inkjet printing technology that builds them up layer by layer,” Herman explains. “We just replace ink in the printheads with pigmented glue, and then glue together successive layers of plaster powder to build up the final physical model.” Two models are made; university mentors keep one, the students keep the other.

“The models make incredible tools,” says Ann Stock, an HHMI investigator and biochemist at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “We use them for explanatory purposes and also to explore how different domains in a family of proteins can be arranged.” Stock mentored one of Pingry School's SMART teams during the 2008-2009 school year (see “The Thrill of Molecules”). She lauds what she says is the program's “backwards” approach to education. Instead of working forward from genes to proteins, she explains, the students backtrack from a protein to its genetic origins, which dictate structure. “These models help to make that whole process real and understandable,” she says.

Deirdre O'Mara, a biology teacher at Pingry School, says the SMART team program provides professors a way to give something back. “They tend to be thrilled that the students get so interested,” she says. “Soon they're having fantastic conversations about theory, structure, and why a particular protein residue is important. You get this high-level conversation that goes on as the relationship develops.”

More than 90 percent of students who participate in SMART report a positive impact on career choices, Herman says. And 85 percent of teachers involved in the SMART program return year after year.

Meanwhile Horlbeck—like many of the 1,300 students who have gone through the SMART team program so far—is eyeing a career in research. And he credits the SMART team experience for teaching him how to make sense of biological structures. “When you first look at a protein, it's hard to see why it performs its specific function,” he says. “But through this experience, we learned how to connect structure and function, which makes proteins much more meaningful.”

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