Introduction for instructors
This module has been developed for use in a 100-level and a 300-level biology course. Students in the 100-level course are studying the compounds released by roots that maintain local soil ecosystems. Students in the 300-level course are studying biomarkers in saliva associated with stress and fatigue. In both courses, a metabolic fingerprint of each sample is collected using nuclear magnetic spectrometry (NMR). Each resulting spectrum is composed of over 18,000 data points. Raw spectra are individually processed before they can be analyzed. Students quickly learn the limits of basic spreadsheet software for calculating and graphing. It is difficult to pick out regions of interest using basic statistical tests. This opens the door to computation using the R package ChemoSpec. Students can see the value of parallelization in the time saved by distributing sample processing tasks. Students can also run basic multivariate analyses.