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Somatic and Molecular Cell Genetics |
Interview with Professor Tim Lyerla
Would you describe the structure and content of this course?
This is an advanced course that is an extension or spin-off from a cell-culture course that most of my students have already taken. It's a very wide ranging kind of techniques course that relies upon students' previous background. The goal is to develop some resources that aren't available right now to enter into the Genome Project and to try to do some amphibian genome studies.
We start off with a certain goal in mind for a class project, and we focus on that. The class project this year is to develop a hygromycin-resistant amphibian cell line, a drug-resistant cell line. That takes quite a bit of effort. We want to do it through a method that is developed around molecular cell biology. We haven't gotten to the end point yet, but we're about two-thirds of the way through. And if it works, we will have that cell line. But it's research, and everybody who is involved in research understands that some things don't always work exactly as you had planned. So far, everything's almost worked out.
In addition, I also ask my students, especially graduate students in the course, to take on a special project beyond the class project. That project can be anything that they want to explore in the realm of cell culture. It can be related to or an extension of the class project, something that they've thought up related to their own research, or something they'd like to do completely independent from the class project. So, each person has his or her own individual project. The undergraduates' projects, for the most part, relate directly to the class project while the graduate students' projects are both independent and related.
Why the study of somatic cells? Why is this important?
Stem cells, for example, are somatic cells. That's a rather active area of study right now. We don't do stem-cell research here, but nonetheless, that's the nature of the type of techniques that we use. These techniques are immediately transferrable to stem-cell type studies. It's both a commercial interest and a biological interest.
What are you hoping students learn by the end of this particular course?
I want my students to have a research experience that is above and beyond what they've done in the past. I'm particularly interested in the students who haven't had the chance to do an individual research project. In fact, the course was built around the notion that, if you haven't had an independent research project, here's a course that allows you to have one and, at the end of the course, you have have an end product to show people.
How is the experience of this course different than a lecture-based course? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
The disadvantages are you're never in control. The advantages are probably the same thing. It's very much a week-to-week process, and you have to be ready to shift gears as difficulties arise. You're problem solving in a number of different areas, which is something you don't typically have to do in a lecture-based course. I like the open-ended format. You don't know where it's going. You haven't got a real clear end point, except that we expect everybody to have something to report at the end.
Why do you choose to do the presentation and paper and no exams to evaluate your students in this class?
Because these students have been through a lot of exams already. This course is an opportunity for them to do a research-oriented project that's fairly challenging. Instead of getting into a kind of traditional mode where there is a certain format or endpoint to reach, I want them to spend their time in the laboratory developing and using their expertise to conduct original research and find out about the background of particular cell lines. There is no right answer here.
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