ALS 406: High Throughput Technologies - Lab
Course Number: ALS 406
Course Name: High Throughput Technologies - Lab
Year: Second year
Semester: Fall
No. Units: 0
Faculty/Instructor(s): Angelika Niemz
Description
This hands-on lab course focuses on applications of laboratory automation and high throughput technologies in drug discovery, biomarker discovery & validation, and basic research. Relevant to drug discovery, students will learn the basics of how to program a liquid handling robot, and how to develop the necessary lab protocols for typical enzyme kinetics, inhibition, and high throughput screening experiments. Students will then execute these experiments on the BioMek liquid handling system at KGI. Relevant to discovery and validation of biomarkers, students will learn how to conduct immunoassays (e.g. for quantification of protein biomarkers) and nucleic acid amplification assays (e.g. for SNP genotyping), either in manual or automated form. Students will further learn how to perform systematic assay optimization using the statistical method Design of Experiments, on the BioMek liquid handler, equipped with the "Automated Assay Optimization" software suite.
Course Materials
Reading assignments will be handed out in class and will be available electronically on Sakai.
Prerequisites
First year MBS science/engineering curriculum, in particular ALS 320. ALS 406 runs in parallel with ALS 409: High Throughput Technologies – Lecture. Students enrolled in ALS 406 also need to be enrolled concurrently in ALS 409.
Topics Covered
Course schedule
0.5 unit course (~ 5h of work per week): a one hour recurring weekly class meeting, plus (on average) 4h per week of lab work. The timing of the lab work is flexible, and the 4h per week includes getting ready for and running experiments, plus evaluating the results. Students will be working in teams of 2-3.
Learning Objectives
After completion of this course, students should:
1.) know the basics of programming a liquid handling robot (the BioMek FX)
2.) be able to plan and independently conduct simple enzyme kinetics experiments, immunoassays, and real time PCR reactions, in manual or automated form
3.) understand and be able to apply standard approaches for assay optimization using Design of Experiments, and utilize software suites such as Design Expert and AAO
4.) be able to gather and evaluate data from experiments covered in this course
5.) be able to properly document their experiments in a laboratory notebook, and write up their results in the form of a technical report.
Grading
Class Participation / Performance in the Lab 30%
Lab Notebook Record Keeping 30%
Lab Report 40%