Molecular Genetics

MBG 223 is where you stop treating DNA as a static information store and start working through the machinery that actually copies, repairs, recombines, and reads it — mostly in prokaryotes, because that's where the mechanisms were first dissected and where they're cleanest to study. Expect two midterms plus a final on the lecture side, but the real time sink is the obligatory lab: twelve sessions of microtools, reports, and a small project, alongside a presentation you'll defend in front of peers. It builds directly on the introductory MBG sequence and sets up everything downstream — eukaryotic gene expression, recombinant DNA, and the cloning courses — so the chapters on replication, recombination, and the operon are the vocabulary you'll be using for the next two years.