Protein Purification

• Many lab classes will teach you common methods for purifying and studying proteins. You might learn ammonium sulfate precipitation and column chromatography, techniques that will help you separate one protein from a slew of others. You might learn SDS-PAGE/Western blotting, a technique to separate proteins on the basis of size and determine whether a specific protein is present in a sample. You'll almost undoubtedly work a spectrophotometer, a tool that helps you determine the concentration of proteins, DNA or other molecules in a solution, and you might even learn how to crystallize proteins -- an essential step before determining their structure through X-ray crystallography.
  
  

Recombinant DNA

• Recombinant DNA techniques revolutionized biology by making it possible to join DNA from two different sources and "genetically engineer" organisms to incorporate new genes. Almost any college with a good science program will give you an opportunity to work with recombinant DNA techniques and other important methods in modern molecular biology. You'll learn how to extract plasmid DNA from E. coli, analyze it through gel electrophoresis and cut it with restriction enzymes before pasting in new sequences with an enzyme called ligase. Next, you'll transform E. coli by creating conditions that cause some of them to take up the altered plasmid DNA and growing them on media where only the genetically engineered E. coli can survive. You may get a chance to work with an incredibly useful technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a process scientists use to make large numbers of copies of a specific part of a DNA molecule. You might also do some work with genome sequencing.
  
  

Microbiology

• Many colleges offer microbiology labs, where you can learn how microbiologists culture and identify bacteria. You'll learn the importance of sterile technique -- how to transfer bacteria to your culture dish while ensuring the culture doesn't become contaminated with other microorganisms. You'll find out how to prepare different kinds of growth media for various kinds of bacteria and how to identify bacteria through observations and/or chemical tests like the Gram stain. You'll also learn how to extract bacterial DNA for sequencing and other kinds of experiments.
  
  

Ecology and Evolution

• Ecology is very different from biochemistry and molecular biology. Whereas the latter focuses on how life works down at the molecular level, ecology looks at relationships between organisms and how nutrients and energy flow through ecosystems. If your college offers an ecology lab course -- and if you enroll in it -- you'll very likely spend some time in the field learning how ecologists study animals and plants in the environment. You might learn about techniques such as mark and recapture, an approach to determining the population of an organism in an area or how to quantify biodiversity. You might also get some exposure to modern genetic techniques that are important in ecology and evolutionary theory, such as the methods scientists use to determine how closely two organisms are related based on their DNA.