Biology by the Numbers
Credit Hour(s): 3 Units
Instructor(s): Gowda
Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Biology 1113; Chemistry 1210, 1220; Statistics 1450, 2450, or 2480; or by permission of instructor.
Role in Microbiology Major: Group 1 Elective
Learning Topics:
- Introduction to biological numeracy – how to estimate and quantitatively reason in biological systems. Order of magnitude estimates and “Fermi calculations.”
- Sizes and geometry – important sizes and shapes across biological systems (e.g., sizes of molecules, proteins, organelles, cells, etc.). What determines these sizes/shapes, and what are their implications?
- Concentrations and absolute numbers – what are cells made of, and how much? From inorganic compounds to metabolites to nucleotides and proteins.
- Energies and forces – the thermal energy scale, bond energies, and energy transfer.
- Rates and durations – time scales of diffusion/active transport, central dogma, and growth. What processes are often rate limiting?
- Information and errors – genes, genomes, and mutations. How much information is in genes and genomes, and how often does it go wrong?
- Biosphere by the numbers – from microbial ecology of the Anthropocene. How much biomass is there on the planet? Of each species? How many microbes?
Learning Objectives:
Successful students will be able to...
- Identify important scales and quantities in biological systems (e.g., typical concentrations of key biomolecules, time scales of translation, sizes of genomes, etc.)
- Translate biological processes into quantitative formulations
- Extract relevant quantities for performing analyses using either quantitative or visual data from literature
- Analyze data to make order of magnitude estimates of biological quantities and processes
- Critique the assumptions, generality, potential failures, and margins of error for quantitative analyses
- Communicate quantitative reasoning, both verbally and visually