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New at SCSU: Biotech Major
New courses, lab to facilitate student and faculty research
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Business New Haven
1/10/2000
By: Michael C. Bingham
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In the coming spring semester, Southern Connecticut State University's biology department will begin offering a new concentration in biotechnology to train students in the techniques and methods of working in that rapidly expanding field.
"Connecticut is attempting to be in the forefront of the biotechnology field, and we want to prepare students to enter any of the big biotechnology companies," says Sarah Martinelli, an SCSU biology professor who will coordinate the new program.
Students who choose the new biotech concentration will take the biotechnology lab course BIO 467, as well as a number of other biology course which will integrate biotech methodologies. The program will encompass gene cloning, analysis of DNA structure and functioning, DNA sequencing and mapping, PCR (polymerase chain reaction) analysis of DNA, analysis of computer databases to compare the structures of diseased and normal genes, and analysis of evolutionary relationships among genes.
Martinelli says that students in the new program will answer questions on a molecular level about how genes can go awry and result in disease.
"Twenty-five years ago one approached genes on a descriptive basis," she says, "but now we can look inside the structure of genes and study how genetic processes can go wrong."
The SCSU biology department now houses a new biotechnology lab to be used for research by students and faculty. The lab will house computers and DNA-sequencing equipment.
"This lab will facilitate our ability to perform research at Southern," Martinelli says. "It will allow us to extend our research into the area of biotechnology and will make possible thesis research in the area of microbiology."
Because of the new lab, Martinelli explains, SCSU biological research can move from the cellular level to the molecular level, which "will greatly strengthen our research."
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