Workshop on Molecular Biology Techniques

Abstract

This polycopié has been written to accompany the laboratory and lecture courses in Workshop on Molecular Biology Techniques offered at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the Molecular and Applied Genetics Department. It is designed as a self-contained, comprehensive reference that covers, in rigorous detail, the nine core techniques of DNA analysis that every modern molecular biologist must master. The field of molecular biology has undergone extraordinary transformation over the past four decades. When the polymerase chain reaction was first described by Kary Mullis in 1983, it was a conceptual breakthrough that few could have imagined would, within a decade, become as routine as pipetting. When Frederick Sanger developed his chain-termination sequencing method in 1977, it required months of dedicated laboratory work to read a few hundred bases of a single gene. Today, a single instrument run can generate the equivalent of the entire human genome, three billion base pairs, in under twenty-four hours. This polycopié situates each technique within this historical trajectory, explaining not just the how, but the why.