Received: 7 February 2020 Revised: 11 March 2020 Accepted: 19 April 2020

DOI: 10.1002/bmb.21357

MULTIMEDIA IN BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR

BIOLOGY EDUCATION

How to arouse students' desire to learn biochemistry

Rongwu Yang

School of Life Sciences, Nanjing

University, Nanjing, China
Correspondence
Rongwu Yang, School of Life Sciences,
Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023,
China.
Email: robertyang@nju.edu.cn
Funding information
Nanjing University teaching fund
Abstract
Teaching biochemistry well is not an easy job for teachers and so is learning
biochemistry well for students. Just as many students often complain, they vir-
tually always fail in either physiology or biochemistry. I have been teaching
biochemistry at Nanjing University for over 25 years and am very successful in
my biochemistry-teaching career. The way and style that I teach biochemistry
is highly praised by both my students and my fellow teachers. As an instructor,
the most important thing is, I think, you have to do your best to arouse or
ignite students' interest in biochemistry learning. But how? In this article, I
will introduce many first-hand practical tips on how to arouse the students
‘interest in studying biochemistry from giving the first lecture to last lecture,
from how to combine advanced teaching methods with traditional teaching
methods to how to combine classic biochemistry with latest biochemical devel-
opments, from the main classroom teaching to organization of extracurricular
activities as the second classroom, and so on. These tips are proven very useful
and then can be followed by other professors who are teaching biochemistry.
Hopefully, they can help many professors improve their skills for teaching
biochemistry.

KEYWORDS
biochemistry, biochemistry song, practical tips

I believe that biochemistry is the most important basic well. You make your students like your course by doing
subject in life sciences, but it is not easy for teachers to as follows:
teach it well and for students to learn it well. As an expe-
rienced biochemistry instructor, the most important 1 Teach every lecture well, especially first one and
thing is that we have to employ every means to arouse last one
students' interest in learning. Here are some practical tips 2 Make your course more interesting
I just want to share which can be used to ignite students' 3 Introduce biochemical knowledge with interesting
interest in studying biochemistry. things or stories

This is how I give my first lecture:

1 | M AK E YOUR S TUDENTS
ENJOY YOUR COURSE a Give a brief welcome speech
b Ask one student randomly to express his/her opinions
This point is very important. If your course is boring, about Biochemistry
your students will be bored and then they cannot learn it c Play one song called “Biochemistry”

Biochem Mol Biol Educ. 2020;1–7. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/bmb © 2020 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 1
2 YANG
d Emphasize the class disciplines and introduce the
grading policy
e Invite the best student in the past semester to share
the biochemistry-learning experiences
f Introduce briefly the recent biochemistry-related
advances made by the Nobel laureates
g Introduce the molecule or breakthrough of the year
related to biochemistry by Science
h Talk about what Biochemistry is and what is the use
of biochemistry1
i Play three videos about biochemistry. The first one is a
news story about how a mother, a politics professor,
treated her kids suffering from cystic fibrosis by self-
studying biochemistry. The second one is also a story
about how an undergraduate student diagnosed with
chordoma from Duke university did his research about
cancer in his spare time. And the third is “the inner life
of the cell” created by Harvard university
j Mobilize students to take part in the biochemistry song
contest
And this is how I give my last lecture:
a Do not start with a bang and end with a whimper
b Echo the first lesson by playing another biochemical
song, “Biochemistry Pie”
c Let students share their biochemistry-studying
experiences
d Speak of their “favorite protein, favorite enzyme and
favorite RNA”
e Replay the third video played in the first lecture and
ask again how much students know about
f Talk about the final exam in brief
g Give a farewell speech in a biochemical way
My farewell speech is: Here let me borrow DNA, pro-
teins and enzymes from biochemistry, to express my best
wishes to you! As simple and beautiful as the DNA Dou-
ble Helix, as helpful as the molecular chaperone, as per-
fect as the triose phosphate isomerase, being in pursuit of
balance and harmony as ribonucleotide reductase and
self-correction just as DNA polymerase!
Some students find biochemistry boring. If the teach-
ing atmosphere in the classroom is also dull, it will be dif-
ficult to raise the students' interest in learning. Therefore,
teachers should try to adjust the atmosphere of the class-
room so that they can be more active, more humorous,
and more interesting during lectures. In this regard,
teachers need to pay attention to cultivating their own
language, and also to introduce some knowledge points
in a fun and humorous way.
I have many examples here for reference. These are
examples I use:
a TCA cycle: Arsenic and death of Wu dalang (a Chinese
historic person)
b Gs protein: Cholera and death of Tchaikovsky (the
famous Russian musician)
c Pyrrolysine: German cows cause methane blast in
Rasdorf
d Peter Mitchell built the lab in his home to seek evi-
dences in support of the chemiosmotic theory
e How did Viagra which was originally developed to
cure heart disease become a medicine to cure ED?
f How did adefovir which was originally developed to cure
AIDS finally become a medicine to cure hepatitis B?
g Introduce the second law by predicting that a building
where you are will collapse some day
h Alcohol fermentation: auto-brewery syndrome
i You can express I love you in a biochemical style: Iso-
leucine Leucine Pyrrolysine Valine Glutamate Tyrosine
Pyrrolysine Selenocysteine
There are also a lot of examples I use to combine bio-
chemical theory with practice
a Biochemistry and disease cure
b Why is eating watermelon skin better for health?
c Why cannot overnight leeks be eaten?
d How is trans-fat formed and why is it harmful to
health?
e Why is eating raw eggs harmful to health?
f Why does the bean milk have to be boiled before being
drunk?
g How do aspirin and nitroglycerin work as medicines?
h Can you read your physical report?
i Can Q10 and carnitine lose your weight?
j What is good or bad about the UV?
k Why cannot wild mushrooms randomly be picked and
eaten?
l Is there anyone who cannot be infected with HIV2?
2 | MA KE Y O U R CO URS E E AS IL Y
UNDERSTOOD
You can make your students easily understand your course
by using analogy, summarizing, making demonstrations,
playing biochemical songs and even playing games.
These are some analogy examples:
a Titin—a great man knows when to yield and when not
b Prion—He that touches pitch shall be defiled
c Cyclin and CDK—Behind every active CDK there is a
cyclin just like behind every successful man there is a
woman
YANG
d F1F0-ATP synthase—molecular cash printer, enzyme—
molecular matchmaker, signal peptide—molecular
zip code
e Phospholipid—yourself (your head is a hydrophilic
head group and your legs are two hydrophobic tails)
f Glycolysis can be likened to cutting in the waist and
phosphate pentose pathway can be likened to
beheading.
g The enzyme and its suicidal inhibitor—the farmer and
snake in the fable
h Why do the receptors of growth factors have to dimer-
ize during action—You scratch my back and I'll
scratch yours
i Function of citrate in the cytosol: one stone, four birds
These are some good summary examples:
a Stories about seven in biochemistry
i Hepapeptide sequence in the alpha-keratin
ii Seven classes of enzymes: the newly-added class is
translocases
iii Seven trans-membrane receptors
iv Hepapeptide sequence (YSPTSPS) of CTD on the
RNA polymerase II
v Seven in one enzyme: mammalian fatty synthase
b Where there are three, there is a competition
(Figure 1)
As for the demo, I think it is particularly useful. Some
complex and abstract processes can make students under-
stand instantly by a simple demonstration. For example,
I use my own neck to demonstrate that the peptide bond
cannot be rotated freely. Actually, I have many other
examples. For instance, I like to use my two fists to repre-
sent two hydrophobic groups and demonstrate why they
F I G U R E 1 Alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) has a higher
affinity for ethanol than it does for methanol (From left to right: Li
Yangguang, Yang Zhiyu and Zhang Yu)
3
can gather together spontaneously in the aqueous solu-
tion; I also like to use the two wires on the podium to
make them entangle too much to demonstrate how the
positive supercoil is formed; I will also use my iPad by
the adapter can be connected to the projector in the class-
room to demonstrate the role of adapter protein in the
signal transduction pathway; I also bring keys and locks
and gloves to demonstrate the “lock and key” model and
the “induced fit” model respectively3; I will have a stu-
dent on stage I demonstrated with “phosphoglycerate
mutase” or catalytic mechanism “phosphoglucose
mutase” together. Here I use “phosphoglycerate mutase”
as an example. I will let the student's representative be
3-phosphoglycerate. Her left and right hands represent
the hydroxyl groups at positions 2 and 3, respectively.
Holding a blue tea cup in her right hand, representing a
phosphate group. I am a mutase, so when I catalyze the
reaction, I do not directly change the tea cup on one
hand to the other, but I need to be phosphorylated first,
so there is a purple tea cup on my hand that represents
my own phosphate group before I can catalyze the reac-
tion. When I was catalyzing, I first gave my phosphate
group (purple) to one hand of him (her), so both hands of
him (her) carried the phosphate group and became
2,3-biphosphoglycerate is a metabolic intermediate, and
then she gave me the blue cup in the left hand, so that it
became 2-phosphoglycerate, and I returned to the previ-
ous phosphorylation state (Figure 2).
As for games, complex processes such as signal path-
ways and metabolic pathways can be considered for use.
Here I have one example, which is to explain the princi-
ple of mass spectrometry sequencing.
Let me talk about the principle of mass spectrometry
to determine the primary structure of proteins. As we all
know, the method of directly determining the primary
structure of proteins is mainly mass spectrometry (MS),
and it is no longer a chemical assay based on the Edman
degradation reaction. How to explain the principles of
MS to students, I think it is best to introduce a specific
peptide as a specific example, and I have been using a
tetrapeptide sequence as an example for many years. This
tetrapeptide is-LOVE. Please note that LOVE here is not
love, but a tetrapeptide composed of leucine, pyrrolysine,
valine, and glutamic acid. Let us say it has been tested by
chemometric methods, now let you verify it with MS. So
how does it work? In fact, the principle of MS is not com-
plicated. It requires us to use a method to “round up” the
peptides that can be directly sequenced, and randomly
cut smaller fragments, such as using inert gases (such as
helium and argon). After the collision, the peptide chain
is randomly broken at the peptide bond, so that it breaks
down into smaller peptides. These formed product ion
fragments are different from each other in mass-to-
4 YANG
charge ratio, so they can be separated and identified
using mass spectrometers, so they are chemically predict-
able. Then we can identify each one like a puzzle. The
small fragments are assembled, and finally the amino
acid sequence of the precursor can be restored. The rea-
son I chose the “love” sequence here is because it is fun
and can inspire students! To use it as the object of
sequencing, we must first break “love.” There are many
“loves” in the sequenced samples. Because the peptide
bond breaks are random, the fragments generated by dif-
ferent “love” breaks are different. Some “loves” have bro-
ken at the three peptide bonds, which can produce L
fragments, O fragments, V fragments, and E fragments. If
there are only these four fragments, we can only know
that “love” is composed of these four amino acid resi-
dues, but we cannot judge their order. Obviously, it is
impossible to have only these four fragments, because the
peptide bonds of other “love” in other positions are bro-
ken, which may produce LO fragments, V fragments, E
fragments, or L fragments, O fragments, and VE frag-
ments, or it is L fragment, OV fragment and E fragment.
With the help of these fragments, we will be able to
assemble the sequence of the original peptide. We can
explain this process on the blackboard, but I chose live
demonstrations and games. Because when I talked about
22 kinds of protein amino acids, I launched an activity
for students to claim amino acids. Since there are nearly
120 students in this class in medical school, they can only
be claimed in groups (a group of no more than 5–6
digits). This kind of group claim just allows me to do live
demos and games. At the beginning, I asked four groups
F I G U R E 2 I demonstrated a
catalytic mechanism of phosphoglycerate
mutase with a student (From left to
right: Yuan Xiaowei and Professor
Rongwu Yang)
of students to claim L, O, V, and E, and each one was
drawn to the front of the classroom to form different
LOVEs. Then I randomly cut them into smaller peptides,
and then sort the assembly. In this way, I believe that all
students should master the basic principles of MS
(Figure 3).
3 | DIVERSIFY YOUR TEACHING
METHODS
Teaching methods must be diversified and are not limited
to one form. But among the various teaching methods, I
highly advocate problem-based, heuristic, and interac-
tive, method because these three methods can attract or
force students to participate in the classroom, prompting
them to continue to think along with the pace of your
lecture. In addition, the teacher should not always stand
on the podium during the class. He must go down, pay
attention to every student who attends the class, and ask
questions at any time. When designing the content of
each lecture, the teacher can design them into one ques-
tion after another. In this way, during teaching, they can
take the form of self-questioning and answering, or let
students answer.
As for “naked teaching,” it is a term I invented, which
means you do not use the modern auxiliary equipment
such as courseware and computers and you just use the
most traditional teaching tools-chalk and blackboard.
Nowadays, some teachers cannot do without the hints of
courseware, and some simply read the courseware, which
YANG
F I G U R E 3 A game I played with
students to determine the LOVE
sequence by mass spectrometry
shows that they are not familiar with the content. You
know, students most hate the teacher who reads the lec-
tures! I do not think that you need to do “naked teaching”
in every lesson, but a qualified teacher must ensure that
he can do every “naked teaching.” Imagine if one day
when you were in class, there was a sudden power outage
in the classroom, and computers and courseware would
not be available at that time. If you could not do a “naked
teaching,” you would be very embarrassed in class.
The teaching methods we can choose are as follows:
a The bilingual teaching
b The multimedia teaching
c Problem-based teaching
d The elicitation method of teaching
e Limited Flipped classroom
f Oral lecture without the help of any other means even
ppt slides
g Small class teaching
h Combination of online courses with off-line courses
4 | ORGANIZE MORE EXTR A-
C U R R I C U L A R AC TI V I T I E S
These are some activities I often organize
a Organize Video-taped Presentation
b Encourage students to write short biochemical poems
or stories
5
c Hold the Contest for biochemical knowledge or bio-
chemical songs
d Encourage students to make wine and yogurt by
fermentation
e Celebrate the birthday for the DNA double helix on
every 4.25
f Promote education about AIDS on each 12.1
A poem written by one student named Jiao Yuting:
Molecular chaperone
You are a molecular partner
I am destined to encounter
In your arms
Past pains
And errors
No longer exist
Can I keep the wrong conformation all the time?
Just because
I want you to be my molecular chaperone
For a lifetime
A story about the boat of friendship written by
Prof. Rongwu Yang:
One day, DNA encountered ribosomes. DNA
said to the ribosome, thank you for translat-
ing the DNA polymerase, which allowed me
to copy a lot of copies, so the genetic infor-
mation can be passed down from generation
to generation. The ribosome replied that I
just translated the DNase. The boat of friend-
ship is turned over immediately!
6 YANG

Music has been proven very helpful for teaching by Song of Hemoglobin (adapted from Sound of Silence)
improving memorization. If you can incorporate music Hemoglobin my old friend
into your teaching effectively and compose songs in You transfer oxygen again
which the music and words can reinforce each other, Because the heme inside is working
music will play a more important role in teaching.4 As Binding O two with no stopping
for the biochemistry song contest, I am just one who first And the heme
advocated and launched the biochemistry song contest Is protected by protein
in China. In 2016, I organized first biochemistry song From the harm
contest between Nanjing University and Shanghai Of oxidation of others
Jiaotong University. In 2017, I organized first China In waterless domain heme lie alone
Undergraduate Biochemistry Song Contest in Nanjing. Where function of the iron born
In 2018, CSBMB organized the second contest in Qing- Atom seized on the prophyrin
dao. In 2019, CSBMB organized the third contest in Stabilized by the two histidine
Hangzhou (Figure 4). All the contests are very successful When carbon monoxide
and a lot of great biochemistry song are created by Take place of O two by mistake
students. Feel suffocated
Rejected by the distal one
Some great biochemistry songs in the contests And in the 3D structure I saw
are as follows: Four chains combined to form you all
a Sweetish glycolysis Some say conformations change together
b Acidic TCA Other say they're changing one another
c The old days of learning biochemistry That's how we tried
d Silencer, I have something to say Explain cooperativity
e Sweet serine protease No one fails
f Orgy of intracellular proteases To fit the curve of affinity
g Song of hemoglobin Friend say I you now should know
h Final receptor What some hidden secrets show
O two just a passer-by to you
Selected Biochemistry Song Lyrics Not the stable partner of you

F I G U R E 4 Photo of Prof. Chang

Zengyi (first one on the back row from
the right), Prof. Rongwu Yang (third one
on the back row from the left) and some
students taking part in Third College
Students Biochemistry Song Contest
YANG
The reason lies inside the Bohr Effect
And also lies in allostery
Proton and C O two
Two-three BPG help too
Tense the state of hemoglobin
So the affinity start decreasing
So O two in the cell can shuttle between
Tissues and our lung
Another round
Composing the song of hemoglobin
A C K N O WL E D G M E N T S
I want to thank Miss Jiao Yuting for her biochemical
poem named molecular chaperone, thank Miss Zhang
Yu, Mr. Yang Ziyu, and Mr. Li Yangguang for the photo
in the Figure and thank the Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology Teaching Committee from The Chinese Society
of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (CSBMB) for
their support.
7
ORCID
Rongwu Yang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8382-3480
RE FER EN CES
1. Neslson DL, Cox MM. Lehninger principles of biochemistry. 7th
ed. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company, 2017.
2. Yang R. Principles of biochemistry (in Chinese). 3rd ed. Beijing,
China: Higher Education Press, 2018.
3. http://www.icourse163.org/course/NJU-1001572004.
4. Gregory JC, Tom M, Jean SF, Katie D. Leveraging the power of
music to improve science education, Int. J Sci Educ. 2016;38(1):
73–95.
How to cite this article: Yang R. How to arouse
students' desire to learn biochemistry. Biochem Mol
Biol Educ. 2020;1–7. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.
21357