Biochemical Methods & Academic Skills 2

Course goals

After successfully completing this course, the students will be able to:

• Explain how the most common experimental techniques in molecular life sciences work at the molecular level;
• Design, perform and document their own experiments;
• Analyse a scientific question to select and apply the most appropriate technique or combination of techniques to answer it;
• Write about their own, or other’s, experimental work, choosing the format most appropriate to the context;
• Explore and practice the multifaceted hard and soft skillsets indispensable in the field of life sciences.

Content

This course is offered as a combination of teaching methods, with a heavy focus on laboratory practicals. Building upon the concepts they have learnt in Biochemistry 1, students perform fundamental biochemical laboratory work and proactively experience a full research cycle in multiple, interconnected practical sessions (design, multiple rounds of preparatory techniques and experimental work, analysis, optimisation).

The following concepts are covered in this course:

• Differences between preparatory and analytical methods;
• Why manipulating macromolecules, and how to;
• How to select the most appropriate procedure to investigate macromolecules and  processes they take part in, based on mechanistic understanding of the methods in the course;
• Principles of data handling;
• Critical analysis of own and others’ experiments in writing;
• How to write a variety of different scientific documents in English, and how to choose between these.