During my college career, I was first introduced to the basic cell and molecular biology principles in Integrative Biology. The second lab in that class helped develop what we were learning in lecture. My group studied swabbed the elevator buttons in Curry and plated them to see what bacteria would grow. After letting them grow for a week, we studied the physical characteristics of each colony. This helped me learn how to swab a sample which I used in later classes such as Genetics and Cell Biology and Microbiology.
In Genetics and Cell Biology I continued to build on this information through more hands on experience in the lab. The first project of the semester was studying variable number of tandem repeats in a sample. This is what is used for paternity testing as a way to track lineage. I was able to practice comparing DNA sequences which helped in the second project.
I still use the basics of this information in many of my classes. This helped a lot with a project in my Genetics class that was based on molecular cloning of Drosophila cells. I did more research into the TREX1 gene and how it can help repair damaged DNA. Through this project I learned about CRISPR-Cas9 which can knock out certain genes, but I want to be able to learn more about the tool works.