This intensive 1.5 semester hour unit 14-week course will familiarize you with research techniques employed in nutrition science research at the molecular, cell, tissue, whole organism and population levels. An understanding of these techniques and their application is essential for reading the nutrition science literature, developing skills as a researcher and appreciating the goals, current limitations and future potential of modern nutrition science research. Eight (at times overlapping) classifications of techniques and experimental approaches will be presented over 12 weeks: 1. Partitioning techniques for biomolecule separation, and downstream analysis by Mass Spectrometry; 2. Physical separation of cell and tissue constituents; 3. Analysis of cell constituents and biomolecules using antibody-based techniques in conjunction with... 4) Fluorescence, Bioluminescence and Imaging techniques; 5. Gene Expression: Analysis and Manipulation; 6. ‘Omics’ and Systems Biology; 7. Data Science (Informatics, Computational Biology, ’Virtual’ Communities/Consortia); 8. Bioengineering and Synthetic Biology. For each technique we will emphasize the underlying principles/theory, work-flow and data output. An understanding of the strengths, limitations and combinatorial implementation of these techniques will facilitate your development as an experimentalist and scholar. An additional goal of this course is to familiarize you with the “virtual” (i.e., online) communities of scientists and the vast resources available to you in public domain websites managed by scientific and information consortia.This is a required course for all Biochemical and Molecular Nutrition (BMN) degree program students. The grading basis for this course is Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.
Instructor: Martin Obin