BIO 105 B TOPICS IN BIOLOGY: RECONSTRUCTING DINOSAUR DNA -UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN MESSAGES OF OUR PAST AND OUR PRESENT
Have you ever wondered what people mean when they say the instructions for life are in our DNA, or that we share most of our genes in common with flies? There is a hidden code in our DNA (called the ‘genetic code’) that provides instructions for how to make every molecule needed to make us. This course will teach you how (with only a few key concepts) you too can decode these instructions, and how to search through the ‘google maps’ project that scientists have made freely available to allow anyone in the world to examine the entire genomes of hundreds of species. Finally, by studying these genomes and running searches for these hidden instructions, we will even be able to deduce what gene ‘fossils’ we have in our DNA, and what these fossils can tell us about the DNA of long-extinct animals like dinosaurs.