Genetics: The Fundamentals
How do we know what we know about heredity? Enhance your scientific thinking and experimental design skills with this in-depth adventure through genetics.
Course Information
Certificate Track
Learn for Free
About this Course
This is the first genetics course in a multi-part series. Building upon the concepts from biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology from our 7.00x Introductory Biology MOOC, these genetics courses go to a new level of depth. How do we know what we know about heredity and how can we design experiments to test hypotheses in genetics?
How do we study the inheritance of different traits? How does that information help us understand heritable diseases? Professors Michael Hemann and Peter Reddien will challenge you to take your foundational knowledge of genetics to the next level. You will explore the foundations of the field of genetics and how to apply those concepts to understand modern studies of heredity.
We developed the 7.03x Genetics series with an emphasis on:
- Developing your scientific thinking skills including articulating hypotheses, designing experiments, performing thought experiments, and interpreting data.
- Using data based on real scientific experiments and highlighting the scientific process in assessments.
- Asserting that biology is an active field that changes daily through examples of research and relevance to medicine, not static information in a textbook.
- Uniting themes and principles that inform how scientists conduct and interpret research.
- Implementing the science of learning in the course design.
What you'll learn
- How to appreciate the applications of genetics to everyday life.
- How to apply terminology appropriately to concepts in genetics.
- How to justify the use of specific techniques and methods for answering different genetic questions.
- How to design genetic crosses to make conclusions about genotypes, modes of inheritance, and linkage.
- How to use a quantitative approach to determine different genetic probabilities and calculate genetic distances.
- How to interpret genetic relationships and modes of inheritance of a trait given a pedigree.
Prerequisites
Undergraduate introductory genetics and and molecular biology (as found in 7.00x Introductory Biology)
Meet your instructors
Michael T. Hemann
Associate Professor of Biology; Intramural Faculty of the Koch Institute
Professor Michael Hemann’s lab addresses the issue that many human cancers do not respond to chemotherapy, and oftentimes those that initially respond eventually acquire drug resistance. They use high-throughput screening technology — combined with mouse stem cell reconstitution and tumor transplantation systems — to investigate the genetic basis for this resistance. The goal is to identify novel cancer drug targets, as well as strategies for tailoring existing cancer therapies to target the vulnerabilities associated with specific malignancies. Learn more from the lab website.
