Do you teach a biology lab that has been disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak?

The following is a guest post written by my colleague, Rob Pennock.

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Do you teach a biology lab that has been disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak?  If so, you may want to consider using the Avida-ED experimental evolution platform as a virtual replacement.

To limit the spread of the coronavirus, many colleages and universities have suspended in-person classes, and instructors have had to scramble to replace them with on-line instruction.  Biology faculty who teach laboratory-based courses find it especially difficult or impossible to do their planned lab exercises.  Avida-ED may provide a valuable substitute for some classes.

Avida-ED is an award-winning educational application developed at Michigan State University for undergraduate biology courses. It is aimed at helping students learn about evolution and the scientific method by allowing them to design and perform actual experiments to test hypotheses about evolutionary mechanisms using evolving digital organisms.  Funded by the NSF, Avida-ED is the educational version of a model system used by researchers to perform evolution experiments–including many that have been published in leading scientific journals (see some examples below).  Avida-ED is not a simulation, but an instantiation of the evolutionary mechanisms and process that allows for real experiments.  Avida-ED produces copious data that can be analyzed within the application or exported for statistical analysis.  Avida-ED has been used in classrooms across the country and around the world for over a decade.

Here are more reasons that Avida-ED may provide a useful, quick replacement for your lab:

• Avida-ED is free.
• Avida-ED requires no special registration or configuration.
• Avida-ED is accessible on-line and runs locally in your web browser.
• The user-friendly interface requires little technical training to use.
• It includes ready-to-use exercises to teach a variety of evolutionary concepts.
• It can also be used for open-ended labs where students design and perform their own experiments.
• It can be used to teach principles of experimental design and scientific method.

See the Avida-ED web site for:

• Link to the Avida-ED application launch page.
• Model exercises (under the Curriculum link).
• The Avida-ED lab book.
• Quick start user manual.
• Background information about digital evolution.
• Articles about Avida-ED, including effectiveness studies.

The Avida-ED team is working to provide instructional videos for the core exercises from train-the-trainer workshops that we have offered in previous summers, where we teach faculty how to use the software in their own classes.  We can also provide instructor support materials for some exercises offline for certified instructors.  A mirror of the Avida-ED site is available in case the primary site goes down.

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Lenski, R. E., C. Ofria, T. C. Collier, and C. Adami.  1999.  Genome complexity, robustness and genetic interactions in digital organisms.  Nature 400: 661-664.

Wilke, C. O., J. Wang, C. Ofria, R. E. Lenski, and C. Adami.  2001.  Evolution of digital organisms at high mutation rates leads to survival of the flattest.  Nature 412: 331-333.

Lenski, R. E., C. Ofria, R. T. Pennock, and C. Adami.  2003.  The evolutionary origin of complex features.  Nature 423: 139-144.

Ofria, C., and C. O. Wilke.  2004.  Avida: A software platform for research in computational evolutionary biology.  Artificial Life 10: 191-229.

Chow, S. S., C. O. Wilke, C. Ofria, R. E. Lenski, and C. Adami.  2004.  Adaptive radiation from resource competition in digital organisms.  Science 305: 84-86.

Ostrowski, E. A., C. Ofria, and R. E. Lenski.  2007.  Ecological specialization and adaptive decay in digital organisms.  American Naturalist 169: E1-E20.

Clune, J., R. T. Pennock, C. Ofria, and R. E. Lenski.  2012.  Ontogeny tends to recapitulate phylogeny in digital organisms.  American Naturalist 180: E54-E63.

Goldsby, H. J., A. Dornhaus, B. Kerr, and C. Ofria.  Task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor and shifts in individuality.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 109: 13686-13691.

Covert, A. W. III, R. E. Lenski, C. O. Wilke, and C. Ofria.  2013.  Experiments on the role of deleterious mutations as stepping stones in adaptive evolution.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 110: E3171-E3178.

Goldsby, H. J., D. B. Knoester, C. Ofria, and B. Kerr.  2014.  The evolutionary origin of somatic cells under the dirty work hypothesis.  PLoS Biology 12: e1001858.

Fortuna, M. A., L. Zaman, C. Ofria, and A. Wagner.  2017.  The genotype-phenotype map of an evolving digital organism.  PLoS Computational Biology 13: e1005414.

Canino-Koning, R., M. J. Wiser, and C. Ofria.  2019.  Fluctuating environments select for short-term phenotypic variation leading to long-term exploration.  PLoS Computational Biology 15: e1006445.

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Evolution Education in Action

This entry is a guest post by my MSU colleague Jim Smith. Jim is one of the PIs on an NSF-supported project to develop Avida-ED as a tool for learning about evolution in action and the nature and practice of science. (Besides Jim’s work with Avida-ED, many readers will be interested in Evo-Ed, a project where he and colleagues have developed teaching and learning materials organized around six case studies of evolution that integrate knowledge of the genetic, biochemical, physiological, and ecological processes at work.) Here is Jim’s report on the Avida-ED professional-development workshop that was recently held here at MSU.

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This past week, we had the pleasure of working together in a 2.5 day workshop with a group of biology faculty from across the country who are interested in evolution education.  As a part of our work in the NSF-funded Active LENS project, and as members of the BEACON NSF Science and Technology Center at Michigan State, our focus in this workshop was finding ways to incorporate the digital evolution software program, Avida-ED, into Biology course offerings.  Avida-ED allows students to understand evolution as an empirical science, where things can be studied and discovered via manipulative experiments, rather than solely as an historical science consisting mainly of observation and deep inference.

This Active-LENS Workshop brought together 20 biology teaching faculty over the course of 2.5 days to build lessons for their courses that incorporate Avida-ED.  On Day 1, we heard presentations from: Rob Pennock, who outlined what Avida-ED is, how it came to be, and why it is important; Rich Lenski, who introduced the group to his 28-year 65,000 generation long-term experimental evolution project and also described how the research platform, Avida, was used to evolve organisms with complex features; and Charles Ofria, who gave us a tour under the hood of Avida-ED, showing us how the program works on a computational level.

An Avidian and its offspring (with mutations) in Avida-ED.

In between these presentations, workshop participants were introduced to a new browser-based version of Avida-ED that is in its final stages of development.  Software developer Diane Blackwood is now “squashing bugs” in this beta version of Avida-ED (3.0), which will be released later this month.  Jim Smith then led the workshop participants through three hands-on exercises that allowed them to see first-hand how Avida-ED could be used in an educational setting to address specific misconceptions that students have about evolutionary processes.  For example, some students think that selection causes the mutations that are advantageous, so one exercise explores whether mutations that confer a beneficial trait arise sooner when selection favors the mutation than when it does not. We also introduced the participants to some independent research projects that our Introductory Cell and Molecular Biology students carried out using Avida-ED.

On Day 2, participants started on their journeys to develop their own Avida-ED lessons and spent most of the day doing so.  This was perhaps the most interesting and challenging part of the workshop, given that the participants came to us from a wide range of institutions and instructional settings.  Thus, each participant had his/her own set of opportunities and challenges to consider during the lesson planning sessions.

In conjunction with, and in between, bouts of lesson planning, Jim Smith introduced participants to and/or reminded them about how to use backward design to plan instruction.  In addition, Mike Wiser presented data showing how he has been using Avida to study fundamental research questions in evolutionary biology, and also presented results of research he has been doing as a member of our team to study impacts of the use of Avida-ED in educational settings.  Moshe Khurgel, who participated in last year’s Active-LENS workshop, described his Avida-ED implementation at Bridgewater College (VA) this past year, and provided the participants with a great set of tips and things to consider as they developed their own curricular pieces.  Louise Mead rounded out the set of presentations on Day 2 by providing participants with some basics on how to assess student learning, and how the work done by the participants would fit into the overall Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) goals of the Avida-ED team.

The big payoff came on Day 3, when each participant team presented their ideas for implementation of Avida-ED into their courses.  These were great! Projects that were presented ranged from the use of Avida-ED in a case-based framework utilizing oil spill remediation to explore how (and when) genetic variation arises in populations (Introductory Cell and Molecular Biology, Kristin Parent and Michaela TerAvest, Michigan State), to using Avida-ED to explore concepts in phylogenetics and compete organisms directly against each other in a March Madness framework (300-level Microbiology Lab, Greg Lang and Sean Buskirk, Lehigh University), to using Avida-ED to explore environmental effects on species diversity (300-level Ecology course, Kellie Kuhn and David Westmoreland, Air Force Academy). Many other creative and innovative ideas were presented by the other participants.

Events such as this 2.5 day workshop are true highlights of an academic life. Working with dedicated faculty who are motivated and energized by the prospect of creating excellent learning experiences for their students is a real pleasure.  It also gives one hope for the future of American science.

The best news is that we will be doing this 2.5 day workshop again next year. Sound like fun? If so, give one of us a shout (I’m at jimsmith@msu.edu), and we’ll see what we can do to have you join the group in the summer of 2017!

— Jim Smith

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