Virtual Labs on Secondary Metabolic Pathways in Plants

Abstract

Information and communication technologies have made a big impact on education system and brought a fundamental change in teaching and learning methods. Computer assisted collaborative learning has gained popularity over the years and revolutionized science education. The remote and virtual lab in plant metabolic pathway lab provides an interactive learning based environment to the students for studying the structural and functional complexity of secondary metabolites in plants. This is achieved by a systematic understanding of complex structure and pathway in plants through series of illustrative and interacting learning tools, tutorials and simulated experiments. Further, users can remotely connect to the virtual lab to learn the High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) instrumentation based on analysis of secondary metabolites in plants (with Tea, Maize and Petunia as the plant models). Further we examined the students’ understanding capability towards these labs with questionnaires designed in a hierarchical manner. This is the first systematic development of virtual laboratory on secondary metabolite pathway that encapsulates the importance of remote and virtual labs over the traditional mode of learning and describes its implementation in relation to the flavonoid pathway in plants. 

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