Shortly after starting the Bio 65 class I found out that the organism we would be working with was Vibrio fischeri.
Why is this an incidence of synchronicity? V. fischeri produces the enzyme bacterial luciferase, responsible for the generation of light by fish and other marine organisms.
My Ph.D. research dissertation title is "Model Compounds for the Bacterial Bioluminescence Reaction"
My research, done in the late 70's and early 80's was concerned with mechanisms of protein action.
Modern bioscience involves cloning genes and genetic engineering.
The class went through all the steps of the process from preparation of the solutions used to searching in the databases for biological information.
That is the start and the finish. What is interesting is what is in the place between those two extremes
What we searched the databases for was the sequence of the DNA operon of V. fischeri that we cloned into a highly mutated strain of E. coli DH5-alpha
First you must know something about DNA so I will point you to a set of pages I use to remind myself how to memorize the structures of the DNA bases DNA is the double helix. DNA is a strand of phosphate ester linkages with a sugar, deoxyribose. This pattern repeats. The graphics show some detail
These sets of pages are a work in progress and as such are subject to editing and rephrasing