Since this was the last week of the quarter, we didn’t require the students to blog as in the previous 9 weeks. Also, mostly we recapped what had happened in the class and discussed various assignments. But the students did measure the antibiotic resistance of their strains, and we also had a powerful demonstration of …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week in lab we finally identified our microbes! The past six weeks have been a culmination of lab work, both successful yet sometimes frustrating, to bring us to this point of finally …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week’s goal was to successfully perform PCR cleanup. Last week we performed gel electrophoresis to determine if there was a positive or negative PCR result. At the end of last week, a …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) Polymerase Chain Reaction Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplifies a small amount of DNA into a much larger amount of DNA within a short time. The purpose of this lab was to prepare the …
A few weeks ago we wrapped up Spring Quarter here at UC Davis and the end of our experimental “Swabs to Genomes” class, taught as a freshman seminar. As we introduced here, the idea was to take a set of students from colonies on a plate (from a swab) through a collection of ready to …
For the last few years our lab has been really excited about the idea of having undergraduates culture bacterial isolates and sequence their genomes. Starting with the Undergraduate Built Environment Genomes Project in 2011, we went on to re-write and upgrade the assembly pipeline that we use, followed by the publication of the “Swabs to …