DUBUQUE, Iowa - Undergraduate student researchers collecting soil samples worldwide to unearth new antibiotics can now examine the ethics of such collection thanks to recently developed curricular resource created by a University of Dubuque professor.

Adam Kleinschmit, PhD, professor of biology, was partially inspired by conversations and values within the UD community, including an emphasis on character virtues and character development. This led him to create and vet the flexible expansion course module that focused on ethics and best scientific practices in bioprospecting, which is the search for useful biological resources. Lessons address how students and researchers should carefully think about where soil samples could be obtained and when prior informed consent and mutually agreed-upon terms may be needed before collecting biological resources.

"I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk about responsible and ethical conduct of research," Kleinschmit said. "It's really important for students to understand and apply best practices when obtaining samples for research purposes."

The curricular resource is connected to Kleinschmit's work with Tiny Earth, course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), an international network, and an antibiotic discovery pipeline. Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it has more than 900 trained instructors in 33 countries who teach over 18,000 students annually. According to its website, Tiny Earth partner instructors teach Tiny Earth students to "develop and test hypotheses, collect soil, isolate bacteria, screen for antibiotic activity, and log data in the Tiny Earth Discovery Database."

Kleinschmit shared that research at the undergraduate level is often a one-on-one mentored experience outside of the classroom, limiting access to students who are able to secure those opportunities. CUREs like Tiny Earth bring that research into the classroom to make the experience more equitable by reaching students who might not otherwise have access to undergraduate research.

"Through the curriculum, students learn core concepts in microbiology while gaining an authentic research experience by bioprospecting," Kleinschmit said. "What's interesting and engaging for students is the research that's being done is to address a major public health issue today: the expansion of antibiotic resistance. Students can engage with this real-world challenge by searching for soil microbes that may produce novel antibiotics."

He added, "If we think about it from the medical context, the greater the number of classes of antibiotics that a physician has, the easier it is to cycle through those to reduce the selective pressure placed on bacterial communities that may otherwise result from relying too heavily on a short list of drugs. If we can find novel classes of antibiotics, that’s just one of the many ways to address antibiotic resistance. In the research experience, students are looking for bacteria, typically in a soil sample from anywhere that the students choose."

Many of the bacteria students find are those that produce compounds already known, like penicillin.

"That's to be expected," Kleinschmit said. "It's exciting when students find those. We're trying to move even beyond that and hopefully find a novel class of antibiotics that works in a different way than known antibiotics."

Throughout the soil sample process, Kleinschmit said it's important that whoever is responsible for the land where a student researcher would like to obtain a soil sample understands why someone wants to obtain a soil sample and gives prior informed consent that a researcher can obtain a sample.

"If students are getting a sample from a private location, they might ask if the owner is willing to donate a soil sample for the research they're doing," he said. "They explain what the research is in layman's terms and why they're doing the research. If they're open to providing that resource as a donation, they share what is found with that individual."

Tiny Earth curriculum can be adapted by faculty to fit within the learning objectives of their courses. In 2019, Kleinschmit began implementing Tiny Earth into his Microbiology course at UD. He began thinking about how to integrate lessons on ethics in microbiology the following academic year. Kleinschmit has taught his expansion module at UD for five years. The first couple years included an assessment tool he designed to gather student feedback. Eventually, the module was validated by colleagues and implemented at 13 collegiate institutions in diverse courses that used Tiny Earth CURE. Student learning was evaluated with a knowledge-based assessment instrument.

Kleinschmit and his colleagues across other institutions recently authored "A Case-Based Bioprospecting Ethics Module for Undergraduate CUREs with Multi-Institution Evidence of Student Learning," which was published in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education.