Topic
Impact of Microorganisms
Framing Question
How do microorganisms provide essential models that give us fundamental knowledge about life processes?
Learning Objectives
- Describe a key study using microbes as model organisms that gave rise to insights about biology that are applicable across kingdoms and domains (e.g., Griffith’s transformation experiment; Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty’s transformation principle experiment; Hershey-Chase phage experiment; Meselson and Stahl’s semi-conservative replication; Jacob and Monod’s lac operon, etc.).
- Describe the features of Escherichia coli that have made it a model organism for studying many different life processes.
- Explain how the rapid growth of microorganisms facilitates evolutionary studies.
- Use genomic tools to trace a given human gene back to a bacterial ancestor.
- Describe synthetic biology efforts in bacteria to define the minimal genome necessary for life.
