MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

Abstract: BSCI189i is an I-series course that focuses on human biological diversity and disproving the concept that race holds biological significance. It is general education course that also seeks to provide non-STEM major students with usable and relevant biological knowledge. The lab portion of the course is designed to provide students with hands-on scientific experience. It is also supposed to reinforce content learned in class and expand on topics lecture had insufficient time to cover. The current version of the lab manual has a two-week exercise in molecular DNA techniques that has students analyse their own DNA for Alu repeat variation. Over the many years of this course, this experiment has rarely worked, yielding gels that are unreadable. This new labs seeks to replace this experiment with one exploring a harmless, common, and highly geographically dispersed polymorphism in their mitochondrial genomes. This will illustrate the importance of genetic diversity discussed in class without providing the students with sensitive information about their genetics. The mitochondrial DNA lab will show students first-hand the technique scientists use to look at human genotypes and give them a greater understanding and appreciation of the course content. I believe this lab will be a good replacement for the current one for several reasons. Firstly, because mitochondrial DNA has a much higher copy number than nuclear DNA, the assay for the polymorphism has a much better chance of working correctly. Secondly, this reinforces the concept of mitochondrial DNA analysis and haplotypes, a core concept covered in lecture.
Word Count: 249
Reader Profile: This document is designed to be used by non-STEM major undergraduate students taking this course in the Fall of 2018. They will be unfamiliar with many things covered in this lab and may not be particularly interested in content outside their primary field of study.
Reader Response: I have been both a student in and teaching assistant for this course. I understand and acknowledge the difficulty students have grasping the complicated technical concepts in this lab. I will break down the procedure in clear and basic ways so the students can understand and appreciate what they are doing. I also want the directions to be very clear to optimize the probability that the experiment will run successfully. In addition, I want to provide charismatic and interesting content and case studies to keep the students engaged and interested.

A, good plan and understanding of your students.

Would this help? I like the approach, with some humor. Can you develop a trouble shooting sheet for the gel problem?
http://palumbi.stanford.edu/SimpleFoolsMaster.pdf

Also, this: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/biotech-dna-technology/dna-sequencing-pcr-electrophoresis/a/gel-electrophoresis