BIOL-3436 Molecular Ecology

This course will explore the cross-disciplinary nature of molecular ecology, which applies molecular genetic tools to address questions in ecology and conservation of earth's biological diversity. The course will be anchored by a project that starts with experimental design, followed by the collection of environmental samples, then uses laboratory techniques to extract and amplify DNA in these samples, individualize each sample, proceeds to prepare genomic (NGS) libraries and sequence them. The sequence data will then be computationally processed to clean and organize the data, and assign sequence data to species. Finally these data will be used to test ecologically relevant hypotheses. Major topics will be introduced via lectures, while students will lead weekly discussions of scientific publications highlighting the various areas of study of molecular ecology. The laboratory part of this course will be the anchor of this course, and students will be working on their project throughout the semester. All the student projects will have the same common components, i.e. environmental data collection, NGS library preparation and NGS data processing, but will differ in the hypotheses to be tested with the data obtained. Therefore the experimental design of individual student projects will drive the environmental data collection. Prerequisites: BIOL 3313, 3113; CHEM 2319, 2119