Create a SMART Team with your students this year!

Take nurturing student interest in the molecular world further by starting a SMART Team! SMART Teams, or Student Modeling a Research Topic, brings students with diverse skills like research, graphic design, and digital modeling together to explore a scientist's research project. Students prepare for their design by first exploring the Amino Acid Starter Kit^© and then they develop a digital version of a protein using Jmol, an online protein modeling software. 3DMD works with your team to 3D print the researched protein, which they will use to help them tell their structure-function story in a capstone event presentation at the DiscoverBMB conference in March. Your role is to guide students on this journey while letting their natural curiosity lead them to scientific discovery. Register your SMART Team and take students on a modeling journey they will never forget!

"This program is having an incredible impact on these students. I can speak of personal experience while interacting with students in the 10th-12th grade at the Hostos-Lincoln Academy under the guidance of Ms. Allison Granberry. The students came to the weekly SMART Teams meetings very much like their fellow students would be coming to a sport team practice, eager to learn and full of excitement. There is no doubt in my mind that the 3D models were key to helping the students get a hands-on feel for the 3D structures."

— Prof. Joel Sussman, Department of Chemical and Structural Biology,

Weizmann Institute of Science

Science Spotlight

Jeffrey L. Bada, PhD, a marine geochemist, is best known for studying the origins of life and trying to find evidence of life outside of Earth. Bada gained access to the original research samples of his mentor Stanley Miller. Bada reassessed this research and discovered several previously unidentified substances which helped gain insight into the origins of life through amino acids produced by a volcano. You can read more about this discovery here. Bada recently theorized the origin of life in the early Hadean eon in a paper from Nature that your students may find interesting. Bada was also NASA's director of the Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology from 1980 to 2009. He helped develop the Mars Organic Detector instruments to look for amino acid residues on the surface of Mars.

Explore the Origins of Life!

While we haven't found life in explorations of Mars so far, you can have your students model the origins of life on Earth with the Water Kit^©. This fun and intuitive kit allows students to explore many complex biology and chemistry concepts. You can find student handouts to use with the Water Kit^© on the Classroom Resources page. Then, ensure you have an Educator Membership to access the answer keys for the handouts!