Coursemaster:

John Majors
Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics
2902 South Building
362-1135
e-mail: majors@biochem.wustl.edu

Place: Cori Auditorium
Time: MWF 10:30-11:30 AM
First Class: 29 August 2007

This course is designed to bridge the gap between the content of typical undergraduate courses in molecular genetics and the current literature in the field. The course is a hybrid between a survey and a special-topics format. It is a survey course in the sense that all the major formal topics of nucleic acids research are touched upon, but within each topic there will be joint emphasis on both a description of the current state of the field and on illustrating the types of conceptual and experimental problems that dominate current research. There is no assigned textbook: the reading list is comprised entirely of journal articles, which are both primary references and short reviews.

The students in BIO548 usually have diverse backgrounds, ranging from advanced undergraduates to clinical fellows; the typical student, however, is a first-year graduate student in the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences. It is assumed that students either already are familiar with the material in a textbook such as Lewin's Genes VIII, Lodish's Molecular Cell Biology or Alberts' Molecular Biology of the Cell, or that they can read a book of this type on their own when they need to strengthen their general knowledge of a particular topic. Although most students will find BIO548 partly redundant with undergraduate courses that they have taken, a more common problem is that students who are using BIO548 as a serious introduction to molecular genetics/biology find that the amount of time required to stay current in the course is substantial.

The course is team-taught by a staff of 6 Washington University researchers. Course grading is primarily based on three in-class exams. (The final is not cumulative.) Each lecturer will assign 1-2 papers per lecture. The material in these papers may appear on the exams. Each lecturer will also hand out a problem set pertaining to the lecture material, which is intended to be a study guide; it will be ungraded. Some of the questions on the problem sets are intended to be similar to exam questions.

In addition to the lectures, there will be five discussion section meetings. The purpose of these meetings is to discuss in detail specially assigned papers. Students will be assigned to a discussion leader for the duration of the course and will be required to write a short critical review of each of the assigned discussion papers. The reviews will be turned in for evaluation and grading.

Grading: Each exam is worth 100pts, each discussion critique 10pts, discussion participation 30pts.

Assignments and Handouts
Lecturers
Syllabus