Microbes or the “unseen majority” are involved in everything from human health to fixing CO2 from the atmosphere into organic carbon. This course will explore the diversity of all microorganisms, as well as their role in medicine, biotechnology, and the environment through learning about their structure, life cycles, geochemical activity, ecology, and nutrition. We will also explore the fundamentals of metabolism and microbial genetics alongside evolution and systematics. Students can expect to gain experience in the scientific method, scientific literature, and evaluating science.

The need for competence in computational tools for biologists is becoming as necessary as that for traditional techniques like PCR and DNA extractions. This course will provide basic training in navigating the command-line environment, utilizing common tools for genomics and ecology, submitting jobs to High-Performance Computing clusters (NIU@HPC Metis), and managing input and output files. Prior computational experience is helpful, but not required. This hands-on course will introduce biologists with minimal to no prior command-line experience to basic bioinformatics skills, software, and analysis pipelines. 

Spring