Biochemistry Laboratory

Catalog description

This course consists of lecture and laboratory components. In the lecture portion of the course, students are introduced to modern technologies used to study proteins, nucleic acids, and other macromolecules as well as the application of these methods in contemporary research. Scientists at Stony Brook University will be invited to present and discuss with students the application of these methods in their current research and in assigned primary publications. The laboratory component is divided into four modules designed to teach basic biochemistry techniques as well as develop the skills of problem solving and analytical thinking. The laboratory modules include: (1) classical biochemistry techniques to extract and quantify cellular constituents such as chlorophyll, DNA, RNA and proteins from Euglena gracilis, (2) characterize bovine catalase enzyme kinetics and design experiments to measure student’s blood catalase levels, (3) purification of a His-tagged protein and the evaluation of its purity using SDS gel electrophoresis and western blot analysis, and (4) students will amplify and sequence their mitochondrial control region DNA and compare their sequence to known sequences dating back to the earliest hominids. For each set of experiments the students will need to write a lab report describing their own work and discuss their results in the light of previously published research. This course routinely offers an opportunity to satisfy the Stony Brook Curriculum WRTD and Upper Division Writing Requirements for the Biology and Biochemistry majors. Students who intend to use the writing assignment in this course to satisfy these requirements must register for BIO 459 when they register for BIO 365.