Instead of using a textbook, is there an alternative curriculum, that simply lis
ID: 35539 • Letter: I
Question
Instead of using a textbook, is there an alternative curriculum, that simply lists a set of pubmed research articles for each topic covered in a typical undergrad molecular biology course?
I am currently learning molecular biology by reading a textbook. Different chapters focus on different topics such as Cells and Genomes, Cell Chemistry, Proteins, DNA, Gene Expression, etc... However, I'd prefer to learn these topics directly from research papers on pubmed.
For example, I would imagine the DNA "chapter" of such a curriculum would include the Watson Crick paper on DNA.
As another example, searching for "Protein" in pubmed reveals a ton of research papers, but which subset of them cover the topics taught in an intro molecular biology course?
The pubmed articles don't have to be free or open access, I'm ok with getting the papers through my university library. Also if an alternative curriculum such as this doesn't exist, maybe there is a supplemental one? Or maybe you can recommend a set of papers that you'd include in such a curriculum?
Explanation / Answer
Tom Silhavy would use a similar method in the first year graduate Molecular Biology course.
His text was basically a set of papers bound into a book "The power of bacterial genetics: a literature based course". I'm not sure its in print anymore, but a used copy can be had. If you find a copy you can just fetch the papers if you like.
You can't do much better than finding excellent papers to read.
Briefly, the class covered the development of selection for mutations and mapping them onto genes - use of bacteriophage and replicate plating. The papers started in the 40s and went on from there to the heyday of molecular biology.
It was an awesome course to take... an awesome baptism of fire.
As they say... Whatever doesn't kill you, will select you for a distinguishing phenotype.