MICB 325 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Catabolism, Low Frequency, Genetic Testing
Document Summary
1: the general topic of this course is molecular genetics. We will cover developments and applications in prokaryotes (bacteria) to learn how to use molecular genetic tools and concepts in analysis of how cells regulate their responses to changing environments. The intent is to lay conceptual foundations for subsequent courses or your post-university life. Different mutations in a gene result in different mutant alleles of that gene. One way to designate alleles relates to phenotype, where the wild type is abbreviated with three letters and + (pro+) whereas the corresponding mutant would be pro-. The corresponding genotypes would be pro+ and pro-. In this example, pro is a gene needed to synthesize the amino acid proline, and pro is the protein product of the pro gene: note well! Throughout this course we will usually consider genes as double-stranded dna sequences. However, we may sometimes consider one strand or the other to illustrate issues relating to genetic analyses.
