Course Requirements and Grading: Student will attend two lab/lecture sessions each week. One hour of each session will be a lecture/discussion period, during which most of the conceptual material will be introduced, and the remaining time will be devoted to laboratory exercises. Required readings from a textbook (see below) will be assigned for each lecture. There will two exams (one mid-semester and one at the end of the course) on the material covered during that part of the course. The purpose of these exams is to test the student’s mastery of lecture and reading material. Finally, a total of four laboratory write-ups will be submitted. Students enrolled in BIO 558 will also write a short (ca. 5 pp.) research proposal on a topic of their choosing within the field of molecular ecology (see below). Grades will be determined as follows:

Lab Work, Attendance and Reports: The Laboratory exercises are in an integral part of this course, and we have planned each lab so that they can be completed within the allotted time and flow smoothly from one day to the next. Therefore, regular attendance is mandatory, and attendance will be included in the "participation" portion of your grade. If you have a pressing reason for not being able to make a class on a particular day, make arrangements ahead of time with one of us. Documented illness is the only excuse we will accept for absences that have not been arranged ahead of time. In addition to the attendance, the quality of your daily lab work will also count toward your participation grade. If you show up on time each day, jump in and work on the lab exercise, and do the work carefully, you will receive a high participation grade. If you miss classes without good reason, sit back and let others do the work, or are sloppy in your execution of the exercise, your participation grade will suffer!

There will be four written lab reports during the course. We will go over the format in lab, but these reports should be written as short papers you would find in a scientific journal (i.e., with a brief introduction, methods, results, and discussion). Specifically we are looking for you to outline the questions that you are addressing, present your data and clearly state your interpretations of the data. Remember, we have not performed these labs ahead of time and there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. You will be graded based on how carefully and clearly you address the questions, not on whether you get some particular result that we are looking for. Written lab reports will be due one week after completion of the laboratory work. In addition to four written reports, there will be one oral presentation at the end of the semester.