I am particularly interested in how students learn and in developing strategies to enhance student learning. That course uses classic articles related to hemoglobin and sickle-cell anemia to introduce second semester biochemistry majors to the discipline. Many of the research articles contain classic experiments by famous scientists. Students interested in secondary science education may work on transforming these experiments into effective classroom demonstrations or experiments for a teaching laboratory. Selection for efficiency in protein synthesis on highly expressed genes results in the preferential use of restricted sets of codons that have coevolved with corresponding sets of abundant tRNAs.
Different organisms can have quite different preferred sets.
Selection for such parallel processing should enhance the comma-free character of highly expressed genes. If you have computers skills and an interesting in mining the genome data bases, this might be a project for you. Virtually all metabolic pathways depend on oxidation-reduction reactions coupled to derivatives of riboflavin , also known as Vitamin B 2 . Little surprise then that riboflavin deficiency can cause death as it does in about 13 days for chicken embryos developing in riboflavin-deficient eggs laid by a particular strain of hens. Due to a mutation in the gene encoding riboflavin-binding protein, these hens cannot deposit riboflavin in their eggs.