The fundamentals of scientific research: an introductory laboratory manual is a laboratory manual geared towards first semester undergraduates enrolled in general biology courses focusing on cell biology. This laboratory curriculum centers on studying a single organism throughout the entire semester serratia marcescens , or s. Marcescens , a bacterium unique in its production of the red pigment prodigiosin. The manual separates the laboratory course into two separate modules. The first module familiarizes students with the organism and lab equipment by performing growth curves, lowry protein assays, quantifying prodigiosin and ATP production, and by performing complementation studies to understand the biochemical pathway responsible for prodigiosin production. Students learn to use microsoft excel to prepare and present data in graphical format, and how to calculate their data into meaningful numbers that can be compared across experiments. The second module requires that the students employ UV mutagenesis to generate hyper-pigmented mutants of s. Marcescens for further characterization.