BIOCHEMISTRY MAJOR: SPECIAL EXPERIENCE WITH BIOCHEMICAL ENGINEERING CLASS
Hello everyone, in this article, the Department of Applied Chemistry would like to share with you some interesting information and experiences about a week of studying for students majoring in Biochemistry. Practice Biochemistry Engineering at International University – Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City.
In Vietnam, biochemistry must be a relatively new discipline compared to other scientific researches in our country. Here, we will participate in the practice sessions of our students. Basically, Biochemistry is the science that explore and research about the chemical processes or metabolic pathways within and relating to living organisms. When participating in practiced classes, students will have the opportunity to transfer a part of exogenous genetic material (coding for a protein) such as vectors or plasmids into a bacterial genome that enables the expression of multiple copies of DNA resulting in large amounts of protein or enzyme. A large amount of protein is useful for medical applications, scientific research or cosmetic products. Some typical studies can be mentioned such as the preparation of large amounts of insulin from E.coli bacteria or Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast to treat diabetes, or the production of Hyaluronic acid from Bacillus subtilis bacteria that is an alternative skin moisturizing due to its biological activities.
It can be said that the Biochemistry Engineering practical course is designed for students to create a general picture of the process of genetic transformation, resulted in synthesizing large amounts of particular protein. This practical lesson improves the laboratory skills at the molecular level and using advanced machines in the laboratory system of the Department of Biotechnology. Here are some pictures from the laboratory course:
The students are preparing the medium in petri dishes before inoculating the bacteria. Each experimental steps are always completely disinfected before conducting to avoid infection from the outside environment.
The next step of our experiment will be inoculating the genetically modified bacteria into a petri dish and growing in an incubator with the appropriate time and temperature.
And this is the result of bacterial culture in the first phase of our practice.
Bacteria after being cultured on petri dish agar will be further cultured in LB broth to conduct steps to isolate useful genetic DNA and proteins. In the next experiments, we will have many opportunities to use modern machines and kits such as Miniprep kit used to purify DNA, or PCR machine to amplify the amount of DNA, measuring protein concentration by using spectrophotometer, and running electrophoresis experiments to verify the separated and obtained DNA and proteins.
We hope the information about this laboratory will be useful and interesting for all of us, for those of you who are preparing to register for classes in the following semesters, or for those of you who are very interested in the major Biochemistry at International University, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City. We sincerely thank you for your interest in industry information and hope that in the next articles we will have the opportunity to learn more about the specialized orientations as well as practice and research classes.
