Hello there!

My name is Leah and I’m a past BIOL 463 student and a 4th year undergrad in the Biology Program at UBC. I’m really interested in cell and developmental biology. I took BIOL 331 and 335 and became hooked! I am particularly interested in molecular biology so I have tailored my degree to focus on developmental genetics. I love learning about all the research being done and I’m excited to see what the future holds for developmental biology field. One of the greatest things about this course is that I felt like a developmental biologist from the get-go. The first assignment I completed (“If I was a developmental biologist” which can be found under the A Few of my Favourite Things page) really got me thinking about what it’s like being a researcher studying developmental biology. Moreover, during the final project when I was designing my experiment I got pretty excited about my research question… so much so that I would have loved to have been able to run the experiment myself!

This blog is a snapshot of the course and includes some of the assignments I completed as well as some of my reflections on my learning and the course material.

Please explore and enjoy!

There are 4 pages for your to peruse through. Before you get going I thought I would give you the lowdown on what to expect under each page.

1. A Few of my Favourite Things

All of my fav BIOL 463 Assignments! This includes:

1) my “If I was a developmental Biologist…” assignment

2) some of the worksheets I did throughout the semester

3) Quiz #2 … this quiz was fun to do and no, I’m not joking 😛

4) my technique infographic poster that I did on TALENs with a couple of friends!

2. A little R&R Anyone?

Under this section you can find all of my review & reflect assignments.

3. Final Project

Putting together this final project was a long and challenging journey. Under this page you can follow along with my journey and read:

1) my initial draft question

2) a copy of the filled out outline of my project

3) a draft of my final project that I handed in for peer review

4) the (awesome!) peer reviews that I received

5) my final project

6) my annotated bibliography

4. Prompted and Unprompted Posts

Under this page, you will find some of my thoughts on the course material and related topics. In this section, I wrote some posts on:

1) Enhancers and Gene Regulation

2) Imprinted Genes (because they’re so cool!)

3) X-Chromosome Inactivation

4) the CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing System

5) how to run RNA/DNA FISH experiment (there’s a video! Woohoo!!)