A cyber-linked undergraduate research experience in computational biomolecular structure prediction and design

Computational biology is an interdisciplinary field, and many computational biology research projects involve distributed teams of scientists. To accomplish their work, these teams must overcome both disciplinary and geographic barriers. Introducing new training paradigms is one way to facilitate research progress in computational biology. Here, we describe a new undergraduate program in biomolecular structure prediction and design in which students conduct research at labs located at geographically-distributed institutions while remaining connected through an online community. This 10-week summer program begins with one week of training on computational biology methods development, transitions to eight weeks of research, and culminates in one week at the Rosetta annual conference. To date, two cohorts of students have participated, tackling research topics including vaccine design, enzyme design, protein-based materials, glycoprotein modeling, crowd-sourced science, RNA processing, hydrogen bond networks, and amyloid formation. Students in the program report outcomes comparable to students who participate in similar in-person programs. These outcomes include the development of a sense of community and increases in their scientific self-efficacy, scientific identity, and science values, all predictors of continuing in a science research career. Furthermore, the program attracted students from diverse backgrounds, which demonstrates the potential of this approach to broaden the participation of young scientists from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in computational biology.Author summary: Computational biology research is frequently conducted by virtual teams: groups of scientists in different locations that use shared resources and online communication tools to collaborate on a problem. It is imperative that the next generation of computational biologists can easily work in these interdisciplinary, distributed settings. However, most undergraduate research training programs are hosted by a single institution. In this report, we describe a new summer undergraduate research program in which students conduct biomolecular modeling research with the Rosetta software in research groups around the world. The students each conducted their own research project in a university-based group while collaborating with other students and members of the Rosetta Commons at a distance using everyday tools such as Slack, Skype, GitHub, and Google Hangouts. When compared with in-person summer research training programs, students report similar or even improved outcomes, including the development of a sense of community and increases in their scientific self-efficacy, scientific identity, and science values. Furthermore, our program attracts a diverse group of students and thus has the potential to help broaden participation in computational biology.