Sunday 10 June 2018

SF Microbiology

This was a second-semester module, as was Genetics, but sure who cares about order anyway.

I really didn't like this course while I was doing it and found it difficult, but once I had some time to study it from textbooks etc. I grew to like some parts of it, especially Genetic Switches and Viruses and that one Fungi topic on drug targets, and Bacterial Surface Structures weren't too bad albeit a bit boring. I ended up enjoying that it wasn't too focused on pathogenicity (Genetic Switches, for example, basically seems to study the systems because they're interesting on their own terms), and I found the superbugs parts some of the most boring, weirdly enough.

 The exam treated me well as I got that one nice Fungi question, and nice Genetic Switches and Viruses questions, so I hope I did decently. After studying and doing essay plans I felt a lot more prepared and happier with it, though to be fair I think that might be because I'd found it so hard, as I then set aside a disproportionate number of study days for it during the study period.

Here is a nice poster I made summarising the module:


LECTURES

Week 1: Bacterial Surface Structures


  • Bacterial Cells & Cell Division
  • Gram-positive and -negative cell envelopes
  • flagella, capsules, slime layers, extracellular polysaccharides, pili
  • peptidoglycan synthesis

Week 2: Toxins & Pathogens

  • Bacterial protein exotoxins
  • Hospital superbugs
  • Community-acquired infections
  • Respiratory infections
This one was pretty awful; the last three lectures involved just a list of different bacteria essentially and their characteristics, without much in terms of underlying principles. I did not do this part for the exam though I did try study it a bit because I wasn't gonna try learn the gram status, shape, (an)aerobic, method of spread, virulence factors (the most interesting part to be fair), motility and envelope properties of a bajillion different bacteria. 

The toxins lecture was fairly interesting though, and I learned why Clostridium tetani (tetanus) and Clostridium botulinum (Botulism and Botox) have opposite effects.

Week 3: Viruses

  • Diversity of viruses
  • virus replication cycle part 1: attachment & entry
  • virus replication cycle part 2: genome replication, protein synthesis, exit
  • viruses and preventing disease e.g. antivirals, vaccines, contact tracing, safe burials
This one was quite cool I will admit. We focused on influenza, polio, HIV and Varicella Zoster Virus and I also did some extra reading in Principles of Virology and managed to get that into my exam essay.

Week 4: Fungi

The first of these 4 lectures didn't go ahead so I'll strike that one out.

  • the fungal world: the good, the bad and the ugly
  • yeasts and their life cycles
  • introduction to yeast genetics
  • mating type switching in yeasts
Unfortunately I only went to the first one as 1) it was very gross, we were shown very graphic pictures of fungal infections in very gross places 2) (the main reason) the lecturer said that without extra reading you'd get a 2.2 and when I asked how we were supposed to have time to do so much extra reading on top of all our other modules and learning the (already difficult) course material, she replied dismissively which was upsetting because I was already stressed and burned-out from Schols and I was working hard. She also told me there were marking rubrics available for the Biology modules but when I went to the science course office and asked about them they said they didn't exist. I decided to not go to the remaining two lectures and just focus on the other sections of the course where I figured I could do better. Prioritising is important. Sometimes I feel like I should go to everything just to have gone but in that sort of situation there's not much point going to something if I'm not going to have time to actually study it properly and could put that effort to more use in another part of the course.

On the bright side, the first lecture had the 'fungal drug targets' part, which I learned well, and that came up beautifully in the exam so i won't complain on that front.

Week 5: Genetic Switches

  • the lambda phage lysis/lysogeny switch
  • the pap pili switch
  • the fim fimbriae switch
  • the P1 plasmid/phage and phage mu, and integrases vs invertases
I was totally bewildered by this course at first and it didn't help that the lecturer put almost no words on a fair amount of his slides so I couldn't make it up after the lecture. It turned out that they're just fairly complicated systems but actually really interesting, once I found a way to get the information after the lecture. For the lambda switch he'd recommended a book chapter called Phage Strategies from Genes X, which turned out to be perfect as it covered the topic in great depth and methodically, so I could understand it and even maybe get a little bit of extra information to throw in for my exam essay. For pap and fim I went through his slides (thankfully they had a bit more words) and read some papers to connect the gaps. It turned out that this (pap specifically I think?) is his research topic so I read a good few of his papers and also took some juicy facts from them to put in essays since might be good to cite his papers. Sadly pap didn't come up in the exam so I couldn't use it, but I preferred the lambda material anyway so I was happy to write about that.

LABS

We had 5 3-hour labs, one a week.
  • yeasts and moulds (looking at them under the microscope mostly)
  • yeasts (sampling our mouths and growing them)
  • various bacteria (again sampling our mouths and trying to grow things like S. aureus and Lactobacillus
  • observing things like bacterial swarming and doing the hanging drop test to test for motility
  • looking at viral plaques and using different methods to ID bacteria
In a personal triumph, I did manage to figure out how to use the microscope and focus it at 40x magnification, though I never did really manage to keep it focused at 100x with the oil lens. We did a ton of Gram testing throughout and I ended up with crystal violet stained on my finger for a few days after one of the labs. We were given 2% for presence in each lab and doing a worksheet, and then 15% (overall) from an MCQ at the end that was quite hard, much harder in my opinion than the Genetics one, to add up to 25% overall from CA.


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