Prince William County Public Schools

[caption id="attachment_180326" align="aligncenter" width="529"] [Photo: The Governor's School, Prince William County Public Schools][/caption]

A biology class at the Governor's School in Innovation Park outside Manassas has been using molecular modeling software to teach its students about the chemical structures of medicines and other pharmaceuticals.

The Governor's School is a collaborative STEM initiative between Manassas, Manassas Park, and Prince William County public school systems. The school is also partnered with George Mason University and offers science, mathematics, engineering, research, and computer science courses for junior or senior high school students.

But even for these highly-intelligent students, some aspects of their studies can be challenging to grasp. One of those aspects, chemical structures, can be complicated even if it's being studied from a textbook.

However, Dr. Elizabeth Romano, a member of the school's faculty who teaches biology, found a way to leap that hurdle when in 2020, she taught her students how biological interactions occur in the creation of medications and other pharmaceuticals. Romano did this by introducing her students to molecular modeling software, which was provided by science-education company Schrodinger. The software can allow students to precisely model the shape and movement of proteins in three dimensions similar to those ones would find in a strand of DNA.

"Our students are interested in how different sorts of therapeutics, different types of either antibiotics or different sorts of drugs that can interact in the protein dynamics and cause different types of cell output," says Dr. Romano. "There's just way too many complex reactions that can occur, but the students are able to narrow down which types of proteins and ligands are interacting based on the Schrodinger environment and can predict with some confidence how strong those reactions are. And then which of those should be further researched in the wet lab environment and that saves time and money and all those different constraints that usually are impacting a research project."

Since this course was taking place during the coronavirus pandemic, there wasn't going to be much chance for Dr. Romano and her students to get into the wet lab to see firsthand how those chemical bonds would be affected. The modeling software not only allowed the class to see what the reactions would look like in three dimensions, but it also gave them a taste of some of the tools they would be using if they decided to go into STEM fields.

One student, Keren Gonzaga, is a recent graduate of Osbourn Park High School and plans to study chemistry and environmental sciences at the College of William and Mary in the fall. Gonzaga was initially intimidated by the software due to her unfamiliarity with it, but as she explored its capabilities, such as its two-dimensional sketching that could be used to virtually create chemical compounds.

"I got even more acquainted when we did the actual experimentation. I did have that good background in familiarizing myself with the various settings," said Gonzaga.

Another Osbourn Park graduate, Thu Luong, who will also join Gonzaga at William and Mary, talked about her nervousness when first using the software and compared it to getting hands-on experience with a nuclear reactor.

"I felt like a child playing with a nuclear reactor, but it eventually did get better. I'm very lucky to be part of the governor school community, where we weren't the only group working with the software," said Luong. "We each had a piece of the puzzle, and we were able to work together to figure it out."

Another Osbourn Park graduate, Iqra Ahmad, talked about how the program helped her conception of what these chemical bonds and reactions would look like and what they would do.

"When we started working on this, it was, maybe Junior year, around the time we were beginning to cover this unit," says Amhad. "We were going over things like cellular energetics, what happens in the cell and what it leads to. This is on a very small scale, individual atoms, and it was hard to fully visualize and wrap my head around. It didn't make sense at first then we started using Schrodinger and saw examples of how the molecules worked, what they looked like, how they bind. It gave us a better idea of what to expect and how it would lead to other things."

The Governor's School and Romano have continued to use the Schrodinger program in their biology classes. Though classes can resume face-to-face instruction, the program has become a powerful tool in demonstrating how chemical bonds and reactions work in a virtual setting.

"We are continuing to utilize Schrodinger in our class and expanding it further, so it is something that the biology and chemistry strands would like to see utilized on a teaching level to be able to underscore the concepts we have," says Dr. Romano. "In addition to how it's been used as the first step in drug design and so we do plan to continue utilizing the software, the goal will be to help students visualize those protein dynamics."

The Governor's School at Innovation Park in Manassas will begin the 2022-2023 school year on Monday, August 22.