Culture Based Analysis of Microorganisms

Catalog description

In a world where genomics/metagenomics techniques are becoming increasingly prevalent our knowledge about the genetic potential of organism is far outstripping our knowledge about how these organisms utilize this potential during growth. It is becoming more important than ever to design and execute culture-based experiments to test the hypotheses generated from our genetic knowledge of these bacteria. This course has been developed to teach students to design and execute culture-based experiments and to complement courses tailored to studying organisms from genetic and ecological perspectives. Additionally, there have been exciting developments in microbial culture that are allowing much of the diversity of microorganisms that are being discovered to be cultured for the first time. This course will explore the culture of microorganisms from both a theoretical and practical perspective with two lectures and one lab per week. Students will learn about culturing bacteria from diverse environments and with a variety of growth requirements using both traditional and cutting-edge methods. The design of experiments involving culturing bacteria will be a key focus and students will design their own culturebased experiment to explore a question of interest. Overall, the learning objectives for students taking the course are: 1) Be able to describe the key factors that determine the culturability of a microorganisms and methods for developing successful culture conditions, 2) Design experiments to isolate and or investigate bacteria of interest in a culture dependent manner, 3) Analyze data derived from bacterial cultures. These objectives will be explored in the context of monocultures, co-cultures and complex community cultures of microorganisms, which will leave students with the tools to answer a wide variety of questions using culture-based techniques.