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This laboratory is the subject of a paper published in the Council
on Undergraduate Research Quarterly:
Monroe, J.D. and I.T. Knight. (1995) Students discover new genes in
an investigative undergraduate molecular biology course. CUR
Quarterly 16:109-114. Reprint requests to Jonathan
Monroe
Laboratory
Schedule for BIO 480
Partial
Laboratory Schedule for BIO 580
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Molecular Biology is an exciting and growing field with applications in a variety of areas of science. Almost every week scientists announce the discovery of a new human gene and many of these genes are the keys to understanding disease and genetic variation in human populations. The application of molecular biology to agriculture is another growth area as more and more genetically engineered agricultural products are approaching market. Molecular biology has become an important part of forensic science and DNA fingerprinting has been used to provide crucial evidence in a growing number of criminal cases. Behind all of these revolutionary events are a rather simple set of techniques for exploring genes and their function which make the study of molecular biology and the process of genetic engineering possible. In the laboratory portion of this course you will learn to use many of these techniques as you are engaged in a semester-long project to identify new genes in a plant species.
The first half of the semester will be devoted to a research project with the goal of discovering the structure and function of new genes in the organism Arabidopsis thaliana , a plant in the Brassica family. Teams of 3 students will work together using an approach which was first proposed by Craig Venter to discover new human genes. He and others, in partnership with several pharmacuetical companies, have used the approach to identify thousands of novel human genes, some of which are being developed for theraputic use. In Venter's approach, laboratory techniques such as molecular cloning and DNA sequencing are used in combination with bioinformatics to rapidly identify the portions of the genome which encode proteins. The data are stored in a database which can be queried by any researcher wanting to compare their information with that of others. Comparative analysis can often lead to the discovery of the function of the proteins encoded by a gene . As these genetic databases grow, the power of their use for identifying and understanding genes also grows.
The second half of the semester will be devoted to generating molecular probes from the genes discovered in the first half. These probes will be used to assay plant genomes in the same way that genetic probes are used in genetic disease diagnosis, monitoring genetically modified agricultural products and forensic applications.
Because this laboratory course is devoted to a single research project, the format is different from laboratory courses in which students conduct a series of separate experiments or laboratory exercises. We will meet for regularly scheduled laboratory periods, but sometimes we will only have a few things to do and the lab will be shorter than the scheduled time. Other times, there will be too much to do and the lab will run over the allotted time. You will be warned when those times will be coming up and if some team members cannot stay longer, others will have to stay and complete the work. Life in a research laboratory rarely conforms to a regular schedule and this course is no exception!
As with any research project, failure is a possible outcome. You will be repeating various techniques numerous times and will no doubt gain a more thorough understanding of the technique as a result. You will be expected to repeat failed experiments outside of formal lab time if necessary. At two points during the semester you will construct posters to share your results with your fellow students and to receive evaluations of your work. Our philosophy for this laboratory is that the effort each of you put into this team project, and your understanding of what you are doing and why you are doing it is much more important than the final result. If, during that process, you discover something new to science, that is icing on the cake!
A WWW lab manual to accompany a Plant Physiology investigative lab project was also developed by one of the authors.
Aug 16, 2000
Copyright (C) 1996, Ivor
Knight and Jonathan
Monroe. All rights reserved.