MMBS 106 — Making Sense of Microbiotic Me (3 Credits, Fall/Spring)
Dramatic changes in socioeconomic status, cultural traditions, population growth, and agriculture are affecting the human microbiome worldwide. Understanding how our diet, nutritional status, and cultural behavior influence the composition and dynamic operations of our gut microbial communities, and the innate and adaptive arms of our immune system, represents an area of scientific need, opportunity, and challenge. This course provides an opportunity for students to become familiar with the concept that humans contain more than just an organized assemblage of mammalian cells. How resident bacteria interact with one another and with transient (often pathogenic) bacterial species is important to understand because these interactions can promote health or potentially aid the transition towards disease. Students will study microbial communities and ecology of the human body and cultural driving forces promoting the transition from those communities associated with health to disease-causing communities. (This CWI course meets the institutional competency requirements in Global Perspectives.) . (3 lecture hours, 0 lab hours, 3 credits)