Undergraduate - UnitMIC3011 - Molecular microbiology

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2014 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 2, 0.125 EFTSL

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Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Science
Offered	Clayton First semester 2014 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Associate Professor Anna Roujeinikova

Synopsis

This unit concentrates on specific aspects of bacterial molecular biology. Areas examined include the molecular biology of plasmids and genetic elements such as plasmids, transposons, integrons and pathogenicity islands, recombination and DNA repair mechanisms. The ability of bacteria to control gene expression in response to extracellular signals will also be examined, as well as the intracellular transport and secretion of macromolecules, and some aspects of bacterial genomics.

Outcomes

On completion of this unit students will be able to:

Describe the mechanisms of replication, maintenance and transfer of bacterial plasmids;

Explain the processes of recombination and DNA repair in bacterial cells;

Describe the molecular biology of transposons, integrons and pathogenicity islands;

Define the molecular aspects of transport, assembly and secretion in the bacterial cell;

Describe how bacteria regulate gene expression;

Develop skills in the molecular analysis of components and processes in the bacterial cell, including the use of bioinformatics to analyse bacterial genomic data;

Demonstrate the ability to execute laboratory experiments relevant to advanced molecular microbiology, as well as analyse and report experimental results by a scientific laboratory report and poster presentation.