Module 4
Purpose: to incorporate the concepts of cellular energetic, metabolic diversity, ecology, niche and natural selection driving population changes into the course.
Instructional Approach:
The module centers around a multi-day laboratory exercise involving enriching and isolating a phenol-degrading organism from the environment. Students were given the following scenario:
A ground spill of a hazardous material (phenol) on a theoretical site left a waste plume that threatens the well-being of children attending a day-care center nearby. The problem posed to the students is to use a cost-benefit analysis of various remediation options to clean up the site.
To carry out this laboratory exercise, students identified sites around the city they believed likely to be contaminated and potentially pristine. They collected soil samples from these sites and used a minimal medium containing phenol as sole carbon source to enrich for those organisms that can metabolize phenol. Several days after setting up the enrichment, the cultures were assayed for the presence of phenol; those that no longer contained phenol putatively contained a phenol-degrading organism.
This module made use of Bioplume2, a public domain software package, and BLAST sequence comparisons.
Resources:
This project
was funded by a grant from the NSF Action Agenda Program.
This site archives the original version of the course. For more information on
how the course is taught today, please visit: http://www.biologyforengineers.org
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