Course Learning Goals

The purpose of this course is to increase the student’s knowledge of synthetic biology, both in theory and in practice. The basic methods of genetic engineering will be taught accompanied by a thorough explanation of their mechanism. The student will also learn about the history of synthetic biology in the context of the development of various microbiological techniques as well as the various institutions devoted to the field, primarily the iGEM Foundation. Students will also learn proper laboratory etiquette and safety procedures. Lastly, consider emphasis will be place on developing critical thinking skills in regards to troubleshooting and designing experiments.

Course Overview

Over the course of the semester, the student will be applying their lab work to build a component of a real iGEM project. Students will be presented with an experimental design, and taught at every step of the course where their work fits into the experiment and, more importantly, how to generalize concepts to solve novel problems. Most lessons will start with a lecture on theory, and then transition to the lab where the ideas that were taught will be physically put into practice.

All of the experiments preformed will be connected as stages of a single project. That project will be modeled after a previous year’s iGEM team, who designed a system that could selectively target and kill certain pathogenic strains of bacteria. The students will create the other half of the experiment, which is a strain of bacteria that models the pathogen this system will target. At the end of these series of experiments, students will have made a fluorescently tagged bacterial strain that could have been actually used in that prior iGEM project.

To accomplish this, students will create cell cultures, prepare a fluorescent gene for expression in bacteria, extract a vector to deliver that gene, introduce the foreign DNA to create a transgenic strain, and then confirm using molecular biology methods that the procedure was successful.

iGEM 101 Syllabus Spring 2015

Session 1 – Introduction to Synthetic Biology and Sterile Technique

Session 2 – Plasmid Miniprep

Session 3 – Gel Electrophoresis and Restriction Endonucleases

Session 4 – Gel/PCR Purification

Session 5 – Ligation and Transformation

Session 6 – Polymerase Chain Reaction

Session 7 – Genetic Model Organisms

Session 8 – Exam