BIOL456W

The availability of sequencing technology combined with the power of computational biology has provided the opportunity to explore microbial communities that until now had remained elusive. Among those are the human microbiomes, ultra-deep oceanic environments and highly bio diverse microbial communities in various environments such as coral reefs or soils. This course will provide students with a real research experience using bioinformatic tools to investigate questions relate to microbial ecology, microbial abundance and microbial metabolic potential. Students will be challenged to learn how to ask interesting and relevant questions, design and conduct appropriate experiments, collect, analyze and interpret data, and share your findings with the scientific community via scientific writing. Students will read, analyze and discuss articles from the primary literature and summarize these in short writing assignments, will keep a lab notebook (preferably electronically) recording the design and results of experiments related to their projects, and will present their results using formal or informal writing after undergoing a thorough and iterative process of peer review and revisions.

All Years