Phage Hunters

Phage Hunters is a one-semester FYS class geared towards providing first-year students with hands on laboratory experience and a general background in molecular biology. Student applications are submitted in the summer and admitted students will receive overrides to register before the end of shopping period. You will isolate, cultivate, and purify a bacteriophage from the local environment. Lab work includes isolation and purification of your own phage, DNA isolation and restriction mapping, and PCR to characterize the phage. There will be a series of lectures that introduce concepts in bacteriology, virology, genetics, and molecular biology. One bacteriophage will be selected among the purified isolates and its genome will be sequenced. If time allows, you will annotate the sequenced genome, which entails identifying all the protein-coding sequences found within the bacteriophage using computational approaches. Instructor permission required. Admittance based on applications