Course: BIT 1
Title: Introduction to Biotechnology
Instructor: Yoder, Dandekar
Units: 4
Quarter Offered: Spring
Prerequisites: None
Catalog Description: Principles and applications of biotechnology. Topics include microbial biotechnology, agricultural biotechnology, biofuels, cloning, bioremediation, medical biotechnology, DNA fingerprinting and forensics.
Summary: Ten topical areas correspond to the ten week quarter. The topics of regulations and ethics will be worked in throughout the course.
- Intro to genes and genomics
- Cell structure, prokaryotes and eukaryotes
- DNA and genes
- Chromosomes and genomes
- RNA and protein synthesis
- Recombinant DNA
- DNA modifying enzymes
- Vectors
- Identifying genes
- Bioinformatics
- Proteins as products
- Medical applications, food processing, textiles, detergents, paper making, adhesives, bioremediation
- Protein structures
- Protein production and purification
- Proteomics
- Microbial biotechnology
- Food products, therapeutic proteins, agricultural components
- Vaccines
- Microbial diagnostics
- Combating bioterrorism
- Biofuels
- Plant biotechnology
- The history of plants and agriculture 101
- Traditional and biotech breeding
- Transgenic plants and altered gene expression
- Applications of transgenic plants
- Non food products, ethanol
- Global world market
- Biofuels
- Animal biotechnology
- Animals in research
- Clones
- Transgenic animals
- Protein hormones for more efficient milk production
- Aquatic biotechnology
- Economics of Aquaculture
- Novel drugs from the sea
- Environmental remediation
- Bioremediation
- Chemicals in the environment
- Fundamentals of clean-up reactions
- Metabolizing microbes
- Genetically engineered microbes
- Fingerprinting and forensics
- The technology
- Isolating DNA
- Rules of evidence
- Familial relationships
- Non-human DNA analysis
- Medical biotechnology
- Detecting and diagnosis of disease
- New medicines, vaccines, and artificial blood
- Gene therapy
- Regenerative medicine
- Human genome project
- Cloning