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Introduction

Amanda Simons

This is the second edition of an OER intended to serve as a starting point for an introductory Genetics course, funded by the ROTEL project, a multi-institutional collaboration among six Massachusetts colleges and universities.
 
This text includes foundational information about both transmission and molecular genetics. Compared to the first edition, there are additional chapters on gene regulation in eukaryotes, cancer biology, and evolution and ancestry. Note that the text intentionally does not include much detail about current techniques in molecular genetics or genomics. Those things change so rapidly, chapters would be out of date within a few semesters! This OER is meant to be supplemented with current resources for such topics.

You can access each chapter via the contents menu at the top left. Clicking the “+” after each chapter heading in the contents menu will let you navigate directly to subsections of each chapter. As you are reading through each chapter, you can navigate to the next section by clicking the “Next” button in the dark blue ribbon at the bottom right of each screen. There is also a button to navigate back to the previous section.Each chapter begins with a list of objectives. This is what you are meant to take away from the reading. As you read, think about how the text relates to those objectives.

Within most chapters are interactive “Test Your Understanding” questions. These are meant to help you reflect on important parts of the text and practice doing the things listed in the objectives. If you click though, you will get an immediate answer.At the end of each chapter are wrap-up questions that are intended to help you engage more deeply with the text and objectives. Many of these questions are open-ended, and answers are not provided. But they can be useful study tools, and they might spark interesting conversations with your instructor!

This is a work in progress. If you find broken links or typos, please let your instructor know so they can be corrected for the next edition.

 

 

License

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Introduction Copyright © 2025 by Amanda Simons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.