Faculty of Science

Objectives

To give a brief introduction to the recent developments in and around the field of biochemistry and molecular bioscience as they contribute to the production of goods and services.

Contents

Biotechnology: Definition of Biotechnology; Classical biotechnologies; fermentation, plant and animal breeding, cell and tissue culture; Modern Biotechnology and scope; Elements of recombinant DNA Technology; Molecular and Immuno-diagnostics; Genomics and Proteomics; Hybridoma technology; The applications of Modern Biotechnology (in DNA fingerprinting, Bt crops; GMOs, Gene therapy; Stem cell research; protein/hormone production; etc); Ethical issues concerning biotechnology.

Bioinformatics: Definition of Bioinformatics, Computational Biology; Historical perspectives; Importance of Bioinformatics; Sequencing methods; Sequence similarity searches – BLAST; Biological databases; Literature searches – PubMed and Google scholar; Comparative/Functional Genomics, the -omics; The NCBI, EXPASy and EBI, etc. websites.

Other emerging Technologies, e.g. nanotechnology