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Learning prokaryotic genetics and molecular biology
•To learn effectively students must connect new information to a body of
knowledge.
• G&MB is very very large and can it can be hard to learn. Why?
•Students often have a limited background about the topic
•Students often know just a little bit about many parts of it
•There are a couple of ways to teach the material.
•One is to use a standard text and learn the topics as they are
presented. For example, we could learn about transcriptional attenuation
using the trp operon as an example, and repression using the gal operon as
an example. SLIDES
You would need first to learn about trptophan metabolism and galactose
metabolism in order to understand how and why these worked. What
happens is that most people try to understand by memorizing the diagrams
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(tyranny of the diagram). This happens because the material doesn't really
connect with a large body of knowledge.
Another way is to build a large body of knowledge about a single thing and
use that to learn new material as it is being built. In this way new material
takes its place next to old material, or replaces it. This is what we are going
to do. And we are going to do it using one of the oldest and most-studied
models for genetics and molecular biology--The E. coli Lac system.
Our job is to: SLIDES
1. Build a body of knowledge.
2. To learn new things as we build it.
3. To use that body as a launching point to investigate new things
Initially, we will build this as it was built by the people who worked on it.
We will know only what they knew, and try to integrate new information
into the growing body of knowledge as we acquire it.
When we are done I hope that you:
1. Understand the lac system of E. coli.
2. Understand how to use the lac system to look at new problems
3. Understand how lac was used to build modern-era molecular biology.
4. Understand that obscure research can lead to real-world applications**.
**This is really one of the most important things a student can take away
from any advanced level science or math course. One can’t predict which
avenues of research will be most productive and give rise to economically
useful knowledge. For example, PCR and new high-throughput sequencing
are a direct result of Tom Brock’s studies of bacteria that live in
Yellowstone hot springs.