SF Genetics

LECTURES:


Week 1: Molecular Genetics

• DNA structure
• DNA replication
• RNA & transcription
• Translation

I find this subject boring but I did really like how much experimental evidence the lectures included, and I actually ended up answering this question in the exam as one of my two essays.

Week 2: Genetic Engineering

• Deciphering the genetic code (discovery of a continuous triplet code and matching amino acids to codons)
• Recombinant DNA and PCR
• Genomics and Transcriptomics
• Genetics and Biotechnology (e.g. Bt insecticides, synthetic artemisinin against malaria, EPSP synthase inhibitors and genetically altered plants that can withstand them). 

The first lecture was interesting but unfortunately I missed it for some reason, and the slides for the other lectures were quite hard to follow. I think it is an interesting subject in general but I didn't love it here. 

Week 3: Mendelian Disorders

I was super excited about this week and ended up getting on well with the lecturer when I started talking to Aoife and at the Scholars' Dinner because I became a Scholar and he became a Fellor on the same day. Unfortunately I couldn't answer his question in the exam because I ended up studying a load of random extra stuff but neglecting significant parts of his lectures. I did write out the slides of course, but I didn't know them well enough to be happy with an essay on them so I didn't choose that one.

Congratulations to @adrianbracken and @mattcampbelltcd who were elected to Fellowship and @frizzyroselle who was announced as a Scholar yesterday!
Full details of announcements available here: https://t.co/q3IQlS26II pic.twitter.com/I2E1DNFAxJ

— TCD Genetics & Micro (@tcdgenmicro) April 10, 2018

(I really love this photo. It's SO Hogwarts-y, with the feast, great hall, and gowns and hats that sort of look like wizard hats in this light. Trinity Monday was a fab day.)

• Mendelian Genetics & Recombination
• Mapping Mendelian Traits (linkage analysis, GWAS)
• Genetics of mendelian diseases - autosomal dominant and recessive, and X-linked recessive
• Quantitative genetics/heritability
• Genetics of common diseases e.g. breast cancer

Week 4: Cancer

This was my favourite as I find cancer genetics really fascinating and I ended up doing a lot of extra reading on this (there was a good chapter on it in Lodish's Molecular Cell Biology and some other textbooks). It didn't really split evenly into four lectures though.

• Cancer in general, mutations and the tissues cancer is most likely to originate in
• Cancer as a multi-step process - the process of transformation e.g. overcoming the Hayflick limit and the limiting factors on cancer development, cancer being monoclonal (super interesting that this was discovered partly by looking at B cell cancers which would be unique because B cells produce unique antibodies), and the discovery of viral origins of cancer and v-Src
• oncogenes like Ras and Raf
• tumour suppressor genes like p53

Week 5: Genetic Regulation

This was a weird sort of module -- I guess I was expecting it to be more like metabolic regulation. But once I went home and studied the stuff in Lehninger I did quite like the genetic regulation stuff, and the genetic regulation week we did in Microbiology as well. 

• The lac operon -- this was cool but it did have a ton from Jacob and Monod's experimental notebooks, which was cool but difficult to understand
• Control of gene expression in eukaryotes -- unfortunately found this quite boring with the whole chromatin aspect, but might not be as bad if we dive into it, I think i just don't like the shallow-but-wide survey of things
• Control of mRNA localisation and translation, and 3' UTRs (+ a lot of stuff about hox genes)
• Control of mRNA splicing, sexual behaviour in Drosophila (fruit flies - we learned about gay flies), and master regulators

The funny thing is that while I am dying to get into Genetics, I actually didn't enjoy the Genetics module that much, although I did really like the cancer section and I found a lot of the extra reading I did really interesting. But I think I'll like the subject as a whole, especially since I really liked Evolution and sophister Genetics has a fair bit of evolution in it, and to be fair I was SUPER burnt out after Schols so that might've contributed to me not enjoying my second semester subjects as much. 

LABS:

We had a lab each week. These included:

• extracting our DNA and using PCR and gel electrophoresis to genotype ourselves for the PTC tasting gene, and comparing that to our phenotype (actually licking some). I'm a heterozygous Taster. I was originally worried it'd be ambiguous, like hmm does this actually taste bitter or is it just the taste of paper but OH BOY IT IS CLEAR. 
• really cool Bioinformatics practical where we looked around an NCBI database at the taster gene and similar genes and had to answer lots of lovely thinky questions like 'how might these genes have evolved' (gene duplication) and looking at differences between human and chimp(?) sequences for the gene to see why chimps can't taste it (they don't have three mutations in the gene like us iirc, they're missing a start codon for the taste receptor protein).
• looking at gene expression in plants under the microscope and finding that for example a gene involved in root development is, y'know, expressed in the roots
• getting E. coli to take up an antibiotic resistance plasmid and express Green Fluorescent Protein (the antibiotic resistance so that we could grow them on rifampicin plates and make sure only successfully transformed ones grew, and GFP we could look at in UV light and see them looking all cool and green). 
• do RT-PCR and look at whether actin and creatine kinase are expressed in brain/lung/skeletal muscle.

I really liked the labs because I learned a lot and they were generally interesting, and I felt they complemented the course well without overlapping too much. The assessment did annoy me though; it was by two lab reports and an MCQ, and while the MCQ was good, I was marked really badly in the lab reports - 61% in the first, because I wrote very concisely what we were told to (since they said to write concisely), and 79% in the second when I wrote tons and tons (of good quality I think). I feel like I wasn't supposed to take them literally? But I didn't know that. So then I ended up with only 85% in CA which is annoying but decent enough I guess.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting module though not my favourite, but I think the subject has potential especially when combined with Evolution and more coding, so I really hope I get into sophister Genetics!