Midterm #2 Discusion session

Audio recording of this lecture

We started out by reviewing the Exams page.

Study hints:

Much of the material for this exam is bulk information. This is very different than the first exam, which was mostly problem-solving, and is different than what the Final exam will be, mostly scientific approaches, concepts, and results taken from papers. Think of this as the steroids part of the course.

Studying from the old exams

As usual, a critical part of studying for the exams in this class is to review the old exams. However, there is a complication with this - I've rearranged the material in the second 2/3rds of the course. As a result, you need to go through both the old midterm exam #2's and the Final exams. But about half of the material on these exams will not be familiar to you and will not be fair game in midterm #2 - it'll be the material that will be covered in the last 1/3rd of the class this year.

Prioritizing your study

Think of the lecture notes as an electronic textbook - in fact, this is exactly what it is, as much of this material (the Bacteria and Archaea) is taken stright out of the textbook for this course I am currently writing! But...would you try to memorize everything in a textbook? Of course not.

If you review the old exams, you'll see that, for the most part, I try to give you broad latitute to choose the specific organisms to use in your answers. You need to know each of the major phylogenetic groups (phyla) of Bacteria and Archaea and their general properties, but you should not try to memorize the trees or taxonomy for these groups. Nor should you memorize everything about all of the organisms I gave as examples within these groups, but instead know the major kinds of organisms within each group (if there is more than one), their properties, and them pick representatives to know about in detail. In other words, work from the top down. Only if and when you're comfortable with these should you broaden your scope to other organisms.

In addition to the bulk information about each of the phylogenetic groups of organisms, each lecture ends in one or more Concept related to thse organisms:

• Primitive thermophiles -> The thermophilic ancetry of Bacteri, and life at high temperatures
• Green phototrophs -> Photosynthesis & carbon fixation
• Proteobacteria -> review of electron transport & the concept of proteobacteria
• Gram-positive Bacteria -> Bacterial development, seconary metabolites, bacterial multicellularity
• Spirochaetes & Bacteroids -> motility
• Deinococci, Chlamydia & Planctomycetes -> reductive evolution of parasites
• Phyla with few or no cultivated members -> How much of the microbial world do we know about?
• Archaea -> Archaea as...
• Eukaryotes -> (sorry, none here)
• Viruses/prions -> Do you buy the prion hypothesis?

You should make these "asides" a high study priority.