Week 15 — Gene Regulation, Mutation & Biotechnology
Why this matters
A nursing student meeting gene therapies, a crime-lab technician reading DNA bands, and a voter weighing whether embryos should be edited all lean on this week's ideas.
In plain language
Every cell in your body carries the same DNA, yet a muscle cell and a nerve cell look and act nothing alike. This week you learn why: cells use gene regulation (switching some genes on and others off) to read only the recipes they need. You also learn what happens when a recipe has a typo, a change called a mutation (a change in the DNA's sequence). Finally, you meet the tools people now use to copy, sort, cut, and edit DNA, and the hard questions those tools raise. Those questions stay open, and you will weigh both sides of them.
- Already covered: Week 14 showed how a gene becomes a protein, codon by codon.
- This week: gene switches, mutations, PCR, gels, CRISPR-Cas9, and the editing questions.
- How they connect: a mutation is a typo you read with last week's codon table.
Focus
Why do cells with the same DNA differ, and what should we do now that we can edit DNA?
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
- [ ] explain gene regulation with the lac operon model
- [ ] sort a base change as silent, missense, nonsense, or frameshift
- [ ] say what PCR, a gel, recombinant DNA, and CRISPR-Cas9 each do
- [ ] read a gel and weigh both sides of gene editing
To-do
Plan your week
- Read Chapter 15 (about 50 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
- Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (20 minutes).
- Run the Biology Lab & Inquiry (2 hours), then the discussion and assignment.
- Take the quiz.
This week's checkpoint: read a gel and say which person a single band rules out.
You've got this
This is the last week of new material. Take it in order; ask your instructor if a step snags.
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