Biotechnology

Written as a laboratory guide for students, this manual walks through the work of isolating and characterising a protein and then cloning the gene that encodes it. The exercises are built so that learners follow the reasoning behind each step as well as the procedure itself, with every chapter explaining why a given experiment is run and what it is meant to reveal.

To keep costs down and spare instructors lengthy setup, the experiments rely on inexpensive, easily obtained organisms: the bacterium Escherichia coli and the yeast Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. Topics include handling, storing and growing microbes on different media, producing protein from cultures, measuring enzyme activity through specific activity assays, batch purification, gel filtration and ion exchange chromatography, isolating genomic and plasmid DNA, and DNA sequencing with computer-based analysis.