Advanced Molecular Biology

MBG 503 takes the central dogma you already know and pushes into how eukaryotic genomes are actually organized, regulated, and repaired — chromatin packaging, transcriptional control, alternative splicing, and the gray areas where DNA repair, recombination, and epigenetics overlap. Most of the work is reading primary literature and presenting a project proposal alongside the lectures, so you're expected to argue from papers rather than just recall textbook chapters. As a spring senior requirement it caps the MBG core and feeds directly into thesis-track and graduate research, where being able to dissect a Cell or Nature paper is the baseline skill.