Author Spotlight: Experiential Tool for Teaching Active Transport Using Ex Vivo Histidine Uptake

Here we propose a pedagogical tool for undergraduate students of biology where we are demonstrating the concept of membrane transport. What we are actually doing here is the, with the objective of showing the transport of histidine, which is an amino acid across the enterocyte membrane, in a simple, easy to perform, inexpensive experimental setting, which can be done in almost any laboratory. The current challenge that we face in an undergraduate laboratory is the ban that has been imposed on animal dissections.

Now because of this, what we are doing here is procuring the intestines from a common vendor and intestines that we do get, however, have a problem because they are not from syngeneic animals, and therefore there would be a variability in the animals samples that we get. So currently there are no simple and easy to perform experiments that can facilitate learning about the concepts of memory and transport. Most of the methods available use hazardous chemicals that are not feasible for teaching learning in a UG setting.

So this technique demonstrates an X vivo setup that doesn’t rely on cell-free extracts, but a tissue sample which can be derived from different available mammalian sources. So that’s the obvious advantage to our method.