Practical Introduction to Molecular Biology
My notes to a physicist friend hoping to join me in a yeast lab
The lab where I work is interested in the mechanics of basic biological processes, which we dissect using yeast as a model organism.
A good friend, a physicist and technology marketing executive by training and profession, will hopefully be joining me in the lab. These are my informal notes to him to get him up to speed in a practical way for our lab, starting with classical methods. My hope is that he, and others interested in making a career transition into a bio lab, will find this introduction useful as well.
1. Molecular biology
A good place as any to start building biology lab skills is molecular biology — which for our purposes means — how do we get a cell to make or do what we need (we use mostly bacteria and yeast).
If you are a biochemist, for example, you will likely need many liters of bacteria to mass-produce the protein you are interested in. How do you do that? With molecular biology. If you are a cell biologist, you may want to tag proteins with a fluorescent probe to see where in the cell they reside. How do you do that? With molecular biology. Almost all the biological disciplines will use some molecular biology in order to…
