Course description

This course will give you practical training in molecular biology techniques. You will develop essential lab skills and practice communicating science through written and oral exercises. The goal of this course is for you to experience the entire process of scientific research. You will learn how to define scientific questions, design and perform experiments, draw conclusions from your data, and propose future experiments. Our class is highly collaborative, and you will work closely with lab partners to learn a variety of molecular techniques to analyze biomolecules. By completing this course, I hope that you will gain independence as a scientist and become prepared for a future career in research, medicine, or education.

Learning objectives

• Confidently pipette, prepare solutions, and extract/analyze nucleic acids and proteins.
• Communicate scientific results through oral presentations, a poster, and your lab notebook.
• Maintain a lab notebook that would allow another student to repeat your work.
• Formulate hypotheses and design rigorous experiments to address your proposed hypotheses.
• Analyze the results of your experiments and propose future research questions.

This guide will contain background material to help you learn the key concepts of this class. This is your free online textbook you will use to prepare for lab!