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Research Techniques in Integrated Bioscience Schedule: 2 lecture hours and 2 x 3 hr. labs per week. Some procedures will involve time outside of regularly scheduled class periods. Course description: Students will learn standard, common biological techniques that are applicable across broad areas of biological investigation. The importance of controls will be considered in each set of experiments. The objective is to equip students with a common set of expertise in experimental design and to provide hands-on experience with techniques commonly used in integrative biology studies. When to apply a given technique, as well as the advantages and limitations of each will be discussed, and demonstrated with lab work.
Topics:
- PCR and its applications, including sequencing and phylogenetic reconstruction - molecules to kingdoms
- Cloning - how to, including bacteria, transformation. Recombinant DNA molecules will be constructed and proteins expressed.
- Eukaryotic animal and plant cell culture, transfection
- Database mining and analysis
- Gene expression studies: how to design and implement. Pros and cons of the use of biological inhibitors in test systems.
- Microscopy, including light, fluorescence, and electron microscopy techniques as well as digital microphotography
- Applications of image analysis in integrated bioscience
- Flow-cytometry and real-time automated sample processing
- Spectroscopy applications and enzyme assays, allozymes and ELISA
- Labeling biological molecules and organisms
- Quantitative genetics and quantitative trait loci (QTL) analyses
- Sampling issues across systems and multivariate analyses
- Radio-labeling biological and nonbiological molecules
- Peptide/DNA synthesis
- Equilibrium constants: metal binding, substrate binding, etc.
- Protein structure: Circular dichroism (CD) will be used to determine secondary structure content of proteins and to follow denaturation.
- How to study proteins using electrophoresis, column chromatography, Western blotting
- Enzyme kinetics: an enzyme kinetics lab that uses the Michaelis-Menten/Lineweaver-Burk analysis.
- Chromatography: HPLC will be used for separation/identification of metabolites, product ratios, etc.
- Applications of bioinformatics in integrated bioscience
- Considerations in optimizing bacterial and mammalaian cell cultures for production of bioengineered/recombinant products
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