Spring Course
This course is offered each spring for upperclassmen. During the first half of the course students learn background and tools in bioinformatics and molecular biology. During the second half of the course the students work on a project. In 2008 the project involved identifying LTR Retrotransposons in a plant of choice (tomato, broccoli, Asparagus, maize, and Striga).
In 2009 the project was simplified. All students worked on mining the newly sequenced maize genome for several families of DNA TEs. Students then looked for polymorphism of elements between several inbred strains.
Course Books