Open educational resources for distributed hands-on teaching in molecular biology
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Date
2025
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Abstract
The urgent need to develop a more equitable bioeconomy has positioned biotechnology capacity building at the forefront of international priorities. However, in many educational institutions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, this remains a major challenge due to limited access to reagents, equipment, and technical documentation. In this work, we describe Open Educational Resources (OER) composed of locally produced biological reagents, open source hardware and free software to teach fundamental techniques in biotechnology such as LAMP DNA amplification, RT-PCR RNA detection, enzyme kinetics and fluorescence imaging. The use of locally produced reagents and devices reduces costs by up to one order of magnitude. During the pandemic lockdowns, these tools were distributed nationwide to students’ homes as a lab-in-a-box for remote teaching of molecular biology. To test their performance, a total of 93 undergraduate students tested these resources during a biochemistry practical course. 27 out of 31 groups (~87%) successfully achieved the objectives of the PCR activity, while 28 out of 31 groups (~90%) correctly identified the target using LAMP reactions. To assess the potential application in secondary school, we organized three workshops for high school teachers from different institutions across Chile and performed an anonymous questionnaire, obtaining a strong agreement on how these OER broaden teachers’ perspectives on the techniques and facilitate the teaching of molecular biology topics. This effort was made possible through a close collaboration with open source technology advocates and members of DIYbio communities, whose work is paving the way for low-cost training in biology. All the protocols and design files are available under open source licenses
Description
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0327975This work was supported by the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) through the ANID Millennium Science Initiative Program (ICN17_022), Fondo de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT 1201684 awarded to C.A. Ramírez-Sarmiento, FONDECYT Regular 1211218 & FONDECYT Regular 1241452 to Fernan Federici, and an International Cooperation Program with Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica (ANID-CONCYTEC covbio0012 awarded to F. Federici and C.A. Ramírez-Sarmiento) and GOSH funding to G. Aidelberg, F. Quero and A. B. Lindner. There was no additional external funding received for this study.Competing interests: The