The purpose of this laboratory manual is to introduce undergraduate students to techniques used in biochemistry and molecular biology laboratories and ensure that they master the lab skills necessary to be competitive in the job market. We present a collection of fifteen experiments that teach students sterile techniques, accurate pipetting, centrifuge usage, PCR, DNA purification, protein expression and purification, HPLC, enzyme kinetics, equilibrium binding assays and introduction to bioinformatics.

The novelty of this manual is the incorporation of a student-driven real real-life research project into the undergraduate curriculum. Since students test their own mutant design, even the most experienced students remain engaged with the process, while the less experienced ones get their first taste of biochemistry research. Inclusion of a research project does not entail a limitation: this manual includes all classic biochemistry techniques such as HPLC or enzyme kinetics and is complete with numerous problem sets relating to each topic.

This course includes several chapters on the latest advancements in bioinformatics: how to access genome databank, perform sequence alignments, design primers, to predict secondary and tertiary structure and to use protein visualization tools.

This course material is based on the textbook written by Gerczei and Pattison under Creative Commons 4.0 license.