You can't really understand an experiment until you do it yourself. And without an understanding of the experiment, you can't really understand what the results mean. With no image in your head, both the experiment and its results are just words, words you can believe or not, both choices equally meaningless. With experience, you can understand experiments by doing them in your head, but until then, physically doing the experiment helps a lot. Unfortunately, you can seldom run to the lab and perform the experiment you just read about, even if you have a lab well equiped with the tools of molecular biology.

But bioinformatics is different. Experiments that rely on computation and digital data (a greatly increasing number of biological experiments) can often be replicated by anyone with a computer and the will to do so. I can't tell you how many times I've stared dimly at an article until I powered up the computer and did the experiment myself. Then the lights flashed.

We're focusing on molecular biology this semester, not bioinformatics. Nonetheless, I will make every attempt to give you the opportunity to perform (in some sense) the experiments you read about. Sometimes the experiment can be simulated on the computer. Other times it is possible to at least analyze the data. Expect, one way or another, to do what you read, as much as possible.

Some simulations will be done within an integrated molecular biology/programming environment called BioBIKE. There's no need for you to learn how to program -- this semester (but wait until next...). I'll be doing almost all the programming myself necessary to make the simulations work.