Who Scared the Cat? A Molecular Crime Scene Investigation Laboratory Exercise.

ABSTRACT: This introductory laboratory exercise gives first-year life science majors or nonmajors an opportunity to gain knowledge and experience in basic bioinformatics and molecular biology laboratory techniques and analysis in the context of a mock crime scene investigation. In this laboratory, students determine if a human (Lady) or dog (Kona) committed the fictional crime of scaring a cat. Students begin by performing in silico PCR using provided dog- and human-specific PCR primers to determine the sequences to be amplified and predict PCR amplicon sizes. They then BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) the in silico PCR results to confirm that the PCR primers are designed to amplify genomic fragments of the cardiac actin gene in both dogs and humans. Finally, they use DNA quan

SUBMITTER: Ott LE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5134950 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature