This Program is a complete laboratory course for teaching molecular biology at the advanced college level. The program is designed for up to 16 students working in pairs and provides essentially all of the chemicals and instructions that are needed to teach seventeen 2-3 hour laboratory sessions. The course consists of experiments carefully selected from Standard Programs 3, 4, and 5 that are presented in a comprehensive integrated laboratory manual. The Table of Contents of the manual and the catalog numbers of the experiments provided with the program are shown below. To use this program, you will need an Accessory Kit, the appropriate electrophoresis equipment, a water bath for DNA hybridization, and a centrifuge that can be operated at a force of at least 3,000 x g. A bacterial shaker is also strongly recommended. The price of the course is about $39 per student per semester if these items are available in your teaching laboratory.
This laboratory course is intended to give students a solid foundation in the molecular biology of DNA and to provide hands-on-experience with the genetic techniques that form the basis of the biotechnology industry. In the first section of the course, students use electrophoresis and restriction nuclease mapping to explore important features of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. DNA hybridization techniques are used in the second segment of the course where students study molecular evolution at the DNA level and examine a specific sequence in the eukaryotic genome. In the final section, students prepare and characterize a library of recombinant plasmids where they receive an appreciation and a detailed understanding of a variety of state-of-the-art DNA cloning techniques.