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Abstract
While the two parts of this dissertation might seem disparate at first glance, bothprojects ultimately seek to understand the basal ideas underlying ideas that lead to larger
phenotypes. The first part investigates student thinking about metabolism, a core concept
of biochemistry courses. This study aims to characterize the ideas students activate and
utilize when solving a metabolism problem they haven’t been exposed to before. Once
the ideas students were using were identified, we also set out to understand how students
were assembling the independent pieces of knowledge into an explanation utilizing the
knowledge-in-pieces framework. By categorizing and attempting to understand how
students assemble those categories of ideas, insight into instruction and future research
projects were gained. The second part of this project investigates the role of Ccrk on
downstream effector proteins and the phenotypes of intraflagellar transport (IFT) machinery movement. Two
downstream effectors known to impact ciliogenesis were confirmed to be differentially
phosphorylated when Ccrk, cell-cycle related kinase, is knocked out in a cell. When Ccrk
is knocked out, we also see lower frequencies of IFT particle movement within cilia and
lower frequencies of the import of new IFT machinery into the cilia. These phenotypes
seem to be linked. In order to further explore the link, stable cell lines expressing
fluorescent cargo alongside fluorescent IFT were generated to assay cargo phenotypes.
Together, this work serves as an interdisciplinary effort to add to the bodies of literature
in both developmental biology and discipline-based education research in biochemistry.