So far, 335 is much easier than 334, and is going at a really slow pace (hopefully we don't get a ridiculously difficult exam with material that we've never seen). Also, most of it is stuff I've already learned before (but in far less detail), so it's a nice little review.
On Friday, the lecture was on
cloning, and the teacher briefly went over the topic of plasmids* as vectors and restriction enzymes. After, he asked us, if we were working in a lab and were told to get clones of of lac+ cells, how would we do it based on what we have just learned? (Ie-how could we get many copies of the
lacZ gene?)
I whispered to my friend, "Use a restriction enzyme to cut out the gene from a lac+ cell and insert it into a plasmid." This was the correct answer, but when I raised my hand to answer, I said, "Get a
pUC19 plasmid!" Yeah, it was a cheeky answer, but I couldn't resist. My teacher laughed.
*The teacher had also given us examples of plasmids that were regularly used in cloning, such as the pUC19 plasmid (which I had actually used in a
cell biology lab), so while my answer was a bit cheeky and not the answer he was looking for, technically it was correct!