Giving students opportunities in a cell and molecular biology lecture course to apply their basic knowledge of the central dogma to research and clinical applications are important for student engagement and nurturing critical thinking skills. Here we describe an exploratory approach to see how the integration of a mini-research project around CRISPR technology affected student learning and enjoyment. The learning objective for this project was to have students apply basic knowledge to analyze genotype, molecular characteristics, and phenotype of genetic diseases using published genetics-based clinical papers and propose the hypothesis why that particular mutation was responsible for the observed phenotype
