5th ONU Intro Molecular Biology Symposium

Department of Biological and
Allied Health Sciences
Mathile Center 107
November 11 - 12, 2010

The ONU Intro Molecular Biology Symposium takes place every Fall and Winter quarters, when the Introduction to Molecular Biology (Biol 217) is taught. Speakers are students registered in the class, who throughout the quarter have written a review paper on molecular biology-related topics.

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Module 4, Lab 14 - Bioinformatics (Phylogeny)

When DNA samples are sent to a sequencing facility the return are files with information. The specific files that a researcher receives are called electropherograms ("recordings of the separated components of mixtures produced by electrophoresis”).

We did a basic analysis of some electropherograms of the Ribonucleotide Reductase Small Subunit (RRss) gene from animals of several phyla. We saved the information in fasta format and did a multiple sequence alignment using ClustalW. We generated a nexus file which was finally used to do crude phylogenetic analyses using the software package PHYLIP on the web.

The exercise was just an example of one of the many possible sequences of steps that can be followed to analyze genetic information. The main point was to go from electropherograms to analysis, even though the ways to analyze DNA sequence data are far too many to cover in a single lab.

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Lecture - Molecular techniques (nucleic acids)

In todays lecture we focused on techniques that are used for analyzing nucleic acids. I decided to focus mainly on DNA sequencing, given how important that such technique has become in the last decade. Topics that were discussed:

• PCR
• PCR in disease diagnosis
• DNA sequencing
• Chain termination method (Sanger method - manual and automated)
• Shotgun sequencing
• Pyrosequencing
• Next-generation sequencing
• DNA typing

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Lecture - Molecular techniques (proteins)

In this lecture we had a snapshot of what could easily be a whole course just on molecular techniques. We focused on protein analysis techniques:

• Purification (column chromatography)
• Separation (SDS PAGE and two-dimensional electrophoresis)
• Detection (western blotting)
• Predicting function (using bioinformatic tools)

We also introduced the basics of techniques focused on nucleic acids, including a discussion of the constantly decreasing cost of sequencing complete genomes.

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