Objectives and Goals

Learning Objectives

• Explain how microbes affect our daily lives
• Apply pure culture technique
• Observe and measure microbial growth
• Develop core competencies in microbiology: structure and function, information flow, energy transfer and evolution
• Manipulate bacteria genetically to address biological questions

Course Goals

• Communicate ideas and arguments effectively in writing and orally
• Solve problems of quantity and rate
• Formulate and test hypotheses
• Analyze and use statistical methods to evaluate data
• Collaborate and work in a team

Text

The required text for the course is the eighth edition of Prescott Microbiology by Willey, Sherwood and Woolverton. You will find eight copies of it on reserve in the Hauser Library. If you have access to, or wish to buy an older edition this is perfectly acceptable, as I am aware of the cost of textbooks. We will also read research articles (primary) and review (secondary) literature in the course.

Journals

Primary and secondary literature used for this course will be from the following journals: Molecular Microbiology, Cellular Microbiology, Journal of Bacteriology, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Infection and Immunity, Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Microbiology, Current Opinions in Microbiology and Trends in Microbiology.

Evaluation

Midterm exams	2 X 100 pts.
Final exam	150 pts.
Homework	100 pts.
Lab reports	70 pts.
Independent Project	100 pts.

Not completing any of the above assignments may result in failure of the course.

Additional Information

The syllabus, and list of readings are tentative, subject to change as the literature is constantly changing.

For lecture, in addition to the readings in Prescott, most all of the primary research articles, as well as secondary review articles are linked on the course website. Other supporting documents can be found as Word or PDF files on the Courses Server.

Come to lab prepared each week. Read the supporting material and set up the experiment in your laboratory notebook prior to beginning the exercise.

A few additional words about the laboratory exercises in Microbiology: In most of the exercises you will need to grow bacteria and then come in on a subsequent day and analyze results.  This means that the time you spend in lab will not be restricted to the time scheduled for your particular section. You will most likely need to spend time in the laboratory on more than one day per week, but the accumulative time will not be more than what was originally scheduled.