This is EPOB 3400, Microbiology
I'm Dr. Steven Schmidt

The goal of this course is to give you a comprehensive understanding of microbes and the microbial world. Tests will be based on the lecture material. Readings are to reinforce the lecture material and to provide background material to enhance your understanding of what is presented in lecture.

The topics to be covered may vary slightly from what is on the syllabus (depending on how far we get during each lecture etc.), but the overall breadth of topics represented on the syllabus will be adhered to. Note that there are 3 tests and a final and that you can drop one test score (including the final).

Exam 1 will cover all of the material presented through Feb. 13th.
Exam 2 will cover physiology, genetics, growth, industrial micro. and environmental micro.
Exam 3 will cover the Fungi through Epidemiology
The Final will be comprehensive with a little extra emphasis on the last two lectures.

What is Microbiology?

In the broadest sense, microbiology is the study of all organisms that are invisible to the naked eye. Most bacteria are around 1 micrometer (µm) in diameter whereas the average width of a eukaryotic microbial cell (e.g. a fungus) is about 10 µm (see OVERHEAD). The major groups of microbes are the Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, Algae and Protista. This course will focus primarily on the first three of these groups.

One of the first things to realize about the microbial world is that microorganisms are everywhere. Almost every natural surface is colonized by microbes (including your skin). Some microorganisms can live quite happily in boiling hot springs, whereas others form complex microbial communities in frozen sea ice.

Most microorganisms are harmless to humans. You swallow millions of microbes every day with no ill effects. In fact, we are dependent on microbes to help us digest our food and to protect our bodies from pathogens. Microbes also keep the biosphere running by carrying out essential functions such as decomposition of dead animals and plants (see OVERHEAD).

Microbes are the dominant form of life on planet Earth. More than half the biomass on Earth consists of microorganisms, whereas animals constitute only 15% of the mass of living organisms on Earth.

Note that microbes come in all shapes and sizes; some of them can even form macroscopic structures such as mushrooms. You can learn more about microbial diversity by visiting the Microbe Zoo at MSU. The Microbe Zoo was co-developed by a former student in this class.

One take home message is that microbes are as much smaller than an elephant as an elephant is smaller than the planet Earth. Therefore an elephant represents a planet's worth of habitable niches for microorganisms. In fact, there are probably more microbes on and in an elephant than there are animals on the earth.

Some things to memorize right from the start:

There are 1 million micrometers in a meter,
1000 nanometers (nm) in a micrometer
and therefore there are 1 billion nm in a meter.

bacteria = plural
bacterium = singular

fungi = pl.
fungus = sing.

protozoa = pl.
protozoan = sing.