Students are introduced to the concept of engineering biological organisms and studying their growth to be able to identify periods of fast and slow growth. They learn that bacteria are found everywhere, including on the surfaces of our hands. Student groups study three different conditions under which bacteria are found and compare the growth of the individual bacteria from each source. In addition to monitoring the quantity of bacteria from differ conditions, they record the growth of bacteria over time, which is an excellent tool to study binary fission and the reproduction of unicellular organisms.

This is a Introduction to microbiology course. The content of this module is syllabus as well as powerpoint slides presentation, using OpenStax Microbiology textbook. Content uploaded by Joanna Gray. All content created by            Jaleh E. Jalili

How can you tell if harmful bacteria are in your food or water that might make you sick? What you eat or drink can be contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites and toxins—pathogens that can be harmful or even fatal. Students learn which contaminants have the greatest health risks and how they enter the food supply. While food supply contaminants can be identified from cultures grown in labs, bioengineers are creating technologies to make the detection of contaminated food quicker, easier and more effective.

Students investigate decomposers and the role of decomposers in maintaining the flow of nutrients in an environment. Students also learn how engineers use decomposers to help clean up wastes in a process known as bioremediation. This lesson concludes a series of six lessons in which students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process, to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems.

Students learn about a special branch of engineering called bioremediation, which is the use of living organisms to aid in the clean-up of pollutant spills. Students learn all about bioremediation and see examples of its importance. In the associated activity, students conduct an experiment and see bioremediation in action!

Students explore the science of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) by using a molecular modeling set to model the processes of photosynthesis and cellular respiration—building on the concept of MFCs that they learned in the associated lesson, “Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration at the Atomic Level.” Students demonstrate the law of conservation of matter by counting atoms in the molecular modeling set. They also re-engineer a new molecular model from which to further gain an understanding of these concepts.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science have developed a new genetic pathway that can be used to co-opt E. coli bacteria to produce maleate, one of the most important industrial chemicals in use today. A chief component in the coatings of substances like nylon and galvanized steel and an important stabilizing agent in pharmaceuticals, maleate is typically produced through harsh treatments of crude oil. But by using genetically engineered microorganisms to produce maleate, the researchers have developed a much more sustainable approach. Maleate is the end product of a complex chemical reaction. Bacteria don’t normally come equipped with machinery to power this reaction, so the researchers had to design a ground-up approach before they could start harvesting maleate. This required careful analysis of the intermediates needed for maleate synthesis and the identification of genes that could help E. coli make each of these molecules..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Animal health is of utmost importance in the production of milk, meat, and other animal products. Although vitamin supplements can help ensure livestock remain as healthy as possible, they are often expensive, driving up the cost of production. To help reduce these costs, a team of researchers set out to better understand how the essential vitamins B and K₂ are produced by microbes in the gastrointestinal tracts of ruminants, which are animals with complex digestive tracts composed of multiple distinct compartments to help them break down their plant-based diets. The team used genetic data from previous studies to identify 1,135,807 genes and 2366 full genomes involved in B or K₂ vitamin biosynthesis in the gastrointestinal tracts of seven ruminant species. They also found that most of this biosynthesis took place in the stomach compartments rather than other regions and that a high-grain diet enhanced most vitamin biosynthesis but inhibited cobalamin synthesis..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Buried within glaciers is a history of ancient ecosystems, including microbes and viruses past. Some of the airborne microbes and viruses that populate our atmosphere are often carried by snowflakes or dust onto the surface of glaciers. By studying glacial ice cores, scientists can reconstruct histories of microbes and viruses and the climatic and environmental conditions they experienced. Two problems that plague current methods of analyzing ice cores are contamination and low microbe biomass. To address these challenges, researchers recently developed a method for decontaminating ice core surfaces and extracting clean inner ice to study microbes and viruses. When applied to ice from the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau in China, the method revealed a unique viral community of mostly novel taxa, providing the first window into viral genomes, communities, and functions in ancient glacier environments..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Tetramates are bioactive natural products that feature a pyrrolidine-2,4-dione ring. Approximately 14% of sequenced strains of Streptococcus mutans, a causative agent of human dental caries, bear the muc biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) to produce mutanocyclin (MUC). MUC is a tetramate that inhibits leukocyte activity, which protects S. mutans from the host’s immune attacks. Some S. mutans strains can also accumulate the intermediates of MUC biosynthesis called reutericyclins (RTCs), which have antibacterial activity. A recent study revealed that the feature ring in MUC is closed via lactam bond formation. This contrasts with most other tetramates, which form their rings via Dieckmann cyclization. It was found that RTC is converted to MUC via the deacylase MucF. Distribution analysis revealed that BCGs like muc are widespread in human-associated bacteria..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Soil and sediment microorganisms are remarkably diverse and are critical for ecosystem health. However, they are underrepresented in public databases, and assembling new metaproteomic datasets is challenging, which makes it difficult to characterize the microorganisms in specific soil samples. To increase the outputs of soil metaproteomic studies, a recent study compared various database construction strategies. Search strategies using either sample-specific metagenomic databases or public databases produced comparable peptide-spectrum matches for a floodplain soil core. However, a two-step cascaded search combining both types of databases led to greater peptide-spectrum matching. The combination strategy also improved functional annotation of the peptides, and the resulting metaproteome (MetaP) annotations correlated well with the metagenome (MetaG) annotations..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Microbiome research has consistently been placed in the spotlight over the past two decades, and has shown tremendous promise in the fields of medicine, environmental science, food production, and agriculture. Life on Earth does not exist without microbes, and we may benefit from learning more about them. Yet, there is no common understanding amongst researchers of what a 'microbiome’ actually is. Researchers are now proposing a common definition of ‘microbiome’ to ensure better, more robust research across different disciplines. The authors build on the historical definition offered by Whipps and colleagues in 1988 using new research insights. Additionally, they highlight the importance of microbiomes as drivers for the health of many eukaryotic hosts, including humans and plants. The proposed amendments to the definition specify the elements of microbiome composition and their interactions..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Phosphorus is essential for life to function. It is a critical component of the energy metabolism molecules, genetic materials, and cell structures of all life. Phosphorus only enters natural ecosystems through the slow weathering of stone. Then microbes help maintain and regulate phosphorus by cycling it between its organic and inorganic forms. Understanding microbial phosphorus cycling is critical to many fields of study, like ecology and agriculture. However, researchers lack a comprehensive understanding of the phosphorus cycling genes microbes use, but the recently developed curated phosphorus cycling database (PCycDB) could help close that gap. PCycDB covers 10 phosphorus metabolic processes and 139 gene families, including several that have been missed elsewhere. Testing PCycDB with simulated datasets revealed high annotation accuracy, positive predictive value, sensitivity, specificity, and negative predictive value..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Students learn about the basic principles of electromicrobiology—the study of microorganisms’ electrical properties—and the potential that these microorganisms may have as a next-generation source of sustainable energy. They are introduced to one such promising source: microbial fuel cells (MFCs). Using the metabolisms of microbes to generate electrical current, MFCs can harvest bioelectricity, or energy, from the processes of photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Students learn about the basics of MFCs and how they function as well as the chemical processes of photosynthesis and cellular respiration

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest nonpolar desert on Earth. The almost complete lack of precipitation means that it can support very little life, especially in its hyperarid core. But this core region harbors expansive fields of ancient boulders that scientists think could shelter unique microbes from the extreme desert environment. To find out, researchers used DNA sequencing techniques to compare the microbes inhabiting the soil directly beneath the Atacama Desert boulders and in the open areas beside them. They found a substantial difference in these microbial communities, with significantly more archaea occupying the soil below the boulders than beside them. Remarkably, the team also discovered that many of these archaea belong to a completely new genus of Thaumarchaeota archaea, which they named Candidatus Nitrosodeserticola. These archaea harbor genes involved in ammonia oxidation, carbon fixation, acetate metabolism, and the ability to tolerate extreme environmental conditions..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Over the course of three sessions, students act as agricultural engineers and learn about the sustainable pest control technique known as soil biosolarization in which organic waste is used to help eliminate pests during soil solarization instead of using toxic compounds like pesticides and fumigants. Student teams prepare seed starter pots using a source of microorganisms (soil or compost) and “organic waste” (such as oatmeal, a source of carbon for the microorganisms). They plant seeds (representing weed seeds) in the pots, add water and cover them with plastic wrap. At experiment end, students count the weed seedlings and assess the efficacy of the soil biosolarization technique in inactivating the weed seeds. An experiment-guiding handout and pre/post quizzes are provided.

In this activity, students act as environmental engineers involved with the clean up of a toxic spill. Using bioremediation as the process, students select which bacteria they will use to eat up the pollutant spilled. Students learn how engineers use bioremediation to make organism degrade harmful chemicals. Engineers must make sure bacteria have everything they need to live and degrade contaminants for bioremediation to happen. Students learn about the needs of living things by setting up an experiment with yeast. The scientific method is reinforced as students must design the experiment themselves making sure they include a control and complete parts of a formal lab report.

The goals of the Thermal Biology Institute's webpage are to present cutting-edge research focused on the biology of geothermal systems, to promote collaboration among researchers and resource agencies, and to advance public education on the biocomplexity of geothermal environments. Information is organized by topic including hot topics, research, current events, outreach, education, and electronic resources.

How can you tell if harmful bacteria are growing in your food? Students learn to culture bacteria in order to examine ground meat and bagged salad samples, looking for common foodborne bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella. After 2-7 days of incubation, they observe and identify the resulting bacteria. Based on their first-hand experiences conducting this conventional biological culturing process, they consider its suitability in meeting society's need for ongoing detection of harmful bacteria in its food supply, leading them to see the need for bioengineering inventions for rapid response bio-detection systems.