Genetics Home Page
Points
As of Sunday, September 27th, you can have earned up to 356 points in the course so far: 15 for sending me your email address before our second class, 35 for taking the online pre-test, 197 from problem sets, 9 from our only quiz so far, and 100 from the first exam. To figure out how you're doing so far, simply add up the points you've received from all those sources, divide by 356, and compare the percentage you get to the course grading scale.
Study Aids
The DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has a number of good animations of molecular genetic techniques, including ones for gel electrophoresis, PCR, and cycle DNA sequencing.
There are several good animations of molecular processes online, including several from Prof. John Giannini at St. Olaf College, including DNA replication, transcription, and translation. Another animation of transcription is at biostudio.com.
News
October 8, 2009. We've just been learning about human pedigrees and X-linked diseases, and now scientists have confirmed that the last Russian royal family indeed suffered from hemophilia, as has long been suspected. Of course they had a rare form of the disease — hemophilia A is for commoners! (read more)
In other news, scientists at Penn State have used molecular genetic techniques (similar to what we're doing in lab with the bacterial identification lab) to identify insects from the smushed remains stuck to the fronts of motor vehicles! (read more)
October 5, 2009. Once again, geneticists have been recognized by the Nobel committee. This year's prize in Medicine or Physiology has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Shostak for their work in understanding telomeres, the aglets of the chromosome. And two days later, molecular biologists take home the Chemistry prize too! This one was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz, and Ada Yonatz for their work elucidating the fine structure of the ribosome.
In other news, scientists have conferred color vision on adult color-blind squirrel monkeys using gene therapy. (And they've got a video!) The researchers hope that their approach can be used in humans; in the U.S. alone red-green color blindness affects 8% of men and nearly 0.4% of women.
September 13, 2009. Dr. Malcolm Casadaban, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, died of what appears to be septicemic plague. Dr. Casadaban was carrying out experiments with a weakened strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague. This strain is generally considered quite safe for researchers to work with, and it is not certain that it was the cause of death in this case. (read more)
August 26, 2009. Bonzo has two mommies. And a daddy. Scientists have improved DNA-transfer techniques so that they can now exclude mitochondrial DNA, resulting in eggs which bear nuclear DNA from one mother and mitochondrial DNA from another. Although this has only been shown to work in rhesus macaques so far, it has the potential to impact human in vitro reproduction (and reproductive case law as well). (read more)
August 12, 2009. Doubtless many of you have tried the PTC taste-test in your high school biology lab: some people can't taste this chemical at all, but most people find it incredibly bitter. It turns out that Neanderthals possessed both alleles of the responsible gene, which poses a puzzle: if you assume that being able to taste bitter foods serves as a warning that they're bad for you (poisonous, for example), then why is the non-taster allele still around tens of thousands of years later? (read more)
July 31, 2009. Sweet! According to an article in Science, "If you take your coffee without sugar or your pancakes without syrup, chances are you've got some European ancestry in your blood. New research reveals that people whose early relatives lived in Europe are more sensitive to sweet tastes than those whose ancestors came from other parts of the world." (read more)
From a few years ago: "Word that genetic researchers had discovered a cell of rice contains more genes than a human cell caused widespread outrage as people across the globe attempted to prove that humans are easily as smart as a grain of rice." (read more)
Classes
Lectures will be held in Dana Lecture Hall, Collier Hall of Science
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 10:20 am to 11:10 am
Lab
Lab meets in Room 301, Collier Hall of Science
Wednesday afternoons from 1:15 to 4:15
Thursday afternoons from 12:45 to 3:45
Friday afternoons from 1:15 to 4:15
Text
The text required for this course is the 7th edition of Genetics: Analysis of Genes and Genomes, by Daniel Hartl and Elizabeth Jones1, published by Jones2 and Bartlett, 2009.
Our text has (surprise!) an associated website.
1No relation.
2Also no relation3.
3To me, anyway4.
4I can't speak to the author's relationship5.
5Jones's, that is6.
6Or Hartl's for that matter, I suppose.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Moravian College considers this to be a personal page. Therefore it is incumbent on me to point out that "The views expressed on this page are the responsibility of the author, Christopher Jones (cjones-at-moravian-dot-edu) and do not necessarily reflect Moravian College or Moravian Theological Seminary policies or official positions."