ABSTRACT
General education in biological courses such as "Principal Biology" is an essential avenue for gaining an understanding of life science and developing an interest in the field. The reform of biological education teaching mode based on interdisciplinary approaches aims to foster cross-disciplinary talents, which is crucial for the rapid development of China's bioeconomy. Teaching method that simply superimposes different subjects is difficult to discover the value of interdisciplinary education. To address this, a novel teaching system and an innovative teaching mode were proposed for "Principal Biology" course by integrating science and engineering subjects, based on the cross-disciplinary feature in Beijing Institute of Technology. The system involves the design of cross-disciplinary course content and the integration of multiple disciplines and knowledge points based on students' majors, taking into account the characteristics of students' physical and mental development. To improve students' scientific literacy and interdisciplinary thinking ability, differentiated and major-driven teaching modes were applied by incorporating the "1+N" mixed and immersive cross-thinking training. The effectiveness of tailored cross-disciplinary teaching was evaluated using "in-teaching" and "post-teaching" data feedback models, which promote the optimization of teaching process and enhance the quality of education in cross-disciplinary biological science.
Subject(s)
Humans , Students , Curriculum , Biological Science Disciplines/education , Universities , Biology/educationABSTRACT
Plastic pollution has become a global environmental issue, making it necessary to explore the environmental disposal technology for plastic waste. Recently, we and other researchers have individually found microorganisms or enzymes from nature that can degrade synthetic plastic. These findings indicated that the capability of these microorganisms or enzymes to degrade plastic could be used for the disposal of plastic waste. Polyurethane (PUR) was one of the most used general plastic and its plastic waste occupied 30% of the total volume of different plastic waste. This review tried to provide a comprehensive summary of the researches on microbial degradation of PUR plastic in the past 70 years since its invention, and focused on the PUR-degrading fungi, bacteria, genes or enzymes, degradation products and the corresponding biological disposal technologies. We finally proposed the key scientific challenges on the development of high efficient biological disposal for PUR waste in the perspective researches.