In January of 2021, along with being a TA for BME 182: Biomedical Product Design class of 45 students, I was also a TA for BME 362: Methods for Molecular and Cell Biology. I would mentor 15 students for this class, and it was mostly laboratory experiments that students needed assistance with. The class itself was about 20 minutes of recitation and an hour and 45 minutes of lab work. The students had weekly assignments to submit which I would grade over the weekend, and the exams would be graded by the professor Dr. Kuei-Chun Wang.
I would run the experiments myself a week before class for that specific experiment so as to troubleshoot and foresee any issues that the students might face while performing the experiment. This class had 16 weeks in total, including holidays and exams. Each student was assigned their own work space to perform their own experiments individually. I had to make them aware about the issues they might face during the experiment that I had foreseen, just to avoid damage and wastage of material. However, I used to let them troubleshoot for themselves and figure out a way to tackle whatever issues they might face. Only if they could not figure out a way, would I help them. This exercise itself was crucial for my students to develop critical thinking skills and a better understanding of the subject through brainstorming. Many of those students wanted to opt for a career path of research and they very well knew this was for the best.
The experiments performed by the students were in the order of:
Micropipetting Techniques and Bacterial Culture.
Bacterial Transformation.
Isolation of Plasmid DNA.
Restriction Digestion and Analysis.
Polymerase Chain Reaction.
Aseptic Techniques and Cell Culture.
Protein Quantification.
Protein Gel Electrophoresis.
Real-time PCR.
Below I attach visually appealing results attained by my students in the experiments they performed.
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