Laboratory Diagnostics

This course covers basic concepts and practical applications of modern laboratory diagnostic techniques. Topics include the principles of testing methodology, quality assurance, and the process of translating data into a diagnosis. Clinical and research test methods to be covered include nucleic acid-based methods, such as hybridization, amplification, and sequencing, non-nucleic acid methods, such as liquid chromatography, biomarker detection, and protein analysis, and technologies such as gel electrophoresis, ribotyping, imaging analyses, and serological testing methodologies. In addition to the test procedures, students are exposed to aspects of statistics, quality control, and regulatory issues to highlight the oversight required to ensure reliable data. A special emphasis will be placed on host-donor matching for transplantations, epidemiological tracking for infectious diseases, and identity analysis for lineage and forensics testing. Prerequisites: Students should have the equivalent of at least one of the following courses: AS.410.604 Cellular Signal Transduction, AS.410.612 Human Molecular Genetics, AS.410.615 Applied Microbiology, AS.410.629 Genes & Disease, AS.410.631 Infectious Diseases, AS.410.660 Immunological Techniques in Biotechnology, AS.410.692 Biological & Chemical Threat Response & Forensics, AS.410.696 Bioassay Development, AS.410.709 Cancer Genomics, or AS.410.750 Molecular Targets & Cancer

This laboratory course introduces students to methods for manipulating and analyzing nucleic acids. Students gain extensive hands-on experience with plasmid purification, restriction mapping, ligations, bacterial transformations, gel electrophoresis, and applications of the polymerase chain reaction. This course is not recommended for students with substantial experience in these methodologies.

This course will introduce students to various methods for analyzing and interpreting transcriptomics data generated from technologies such as oligonucleotides or two-channel microarrays, qRT-PCR, and RNA sequencing. Topics will include scaling/normalization, outlier analysis, and missing value imputation. Students will learn how to identify differentially expressed genes and correlate their expression with clinical outcomes such as disease activity or survival with relevant statistical tests; methods to control for multiple testing will also be presented. An introduction to linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods and both supervised and unsupervised clustering and classification approaches will be provided. Open source tools and databases for biological interpretation of results will be introduced. Assignments and concepts will make use of publicly available datasets, and students will compute and visualize results using the statistical software R. Prerequisites: 410.602 Molecular Biology, 410.645 Biostatistics, 410.634 Practical Computer Concepts for Bioinformatics

This laboratory course introduces students to the isolation, cultivation, and differentiation of stem cells. Students are introduced to reprogramming and differentiation protocols for various stem cell and cell progenitor types, as well as the basics of tissue engineering and scaling up cells into mini-bioreactors for large-scale use. The class will include industry-wide practices in cGMP. Please contact individual section instructors for hands-on laboratory exercises included in their section. Prerequisites: 410.604 Cellular Signal Transduction or equivalent, 410.652 Cell Culture Techniques or approval of academic advisor.