Week 18 of 22
NOVEMBER 23 TO 30
Fiction. No real student, family or grade appears.
Who owns an engineered protein, and what a patent on a therapy does to its price.
Plasmids as the vehicle, restriction enzymes as the scissors, ligase as the glue. Each enzyme cuts one specific sequence, which is what makes the cut predictable.
The whole workflow end to end: cut, insert, transform, select, express, purify. Every step has a way to fail and a way to check.
Getting bacteria to actually make the protein, and confirming they did. Present is not the same as correctly folded and functional.
Quiz, then straight on with the workflow still fresh.
The optional research extra credit. A university lab hosted a few of us and a graduate researcher walked us through her project.
RESEARCHER
I did not settle on research until my third year of college.