Subject Code/Name: BIOM20001: Molecular and Cellular Biomedicine Workload: 6 x 1 hour lectures per week, 1 x 3 hour practicals/CAL per fortnight and 9 x 1 hour tutorials.
Note that most of the time, your tutorials are simply another lecture (giving you a whooping 6-7 lectures per week). Other times they will be a workshop and they may teach some non-examinable extension. Attendance to CALs is not mandatory (with the exception of the Microbiology practical, where you will have 2 pracs of 1.5 hours each).
Only the Microbiology part of the course has practicals dedicated to it. All other topics are covered in CALs.
Assessment: 5 x continuous assessment exercises during semester - 10% (2% each) - these are CALs/pracs
2 x intra-semester tests during semester - 20% (10% each)
2 x 2 hour examinations during the exam period - 70% (35% each)
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture.
Past exams available: All of the 2010 is uploaded, most of the 2011 exams are uploaded apart from the MCQs. The exams have changed from those times though - now, Paper A is completely MCQ/fill in the blanks, and Paper B is all short answer. For MST1, the 2011-2012 copies were uploaded on the LMS, and for MST2, the 2011-2013 copies were uploaded on the LMS. You won't get any solutions or marking schemes.
Textbook Recommendation: A whole lot of textbooks that you don't really need unless you are really struggling. I only ever briefly opened the textbooks twice over the whole subject.
Molecular Biology of the Cell is the textbook which covers a lot of the course, and a lot of the diagrams on the lecture slides are ripped out of it. Kumar's Pathology may be helpful considering that Pathology is probably the hardest part of the course to get your head around. You can find all of the textbooks you need online as pdfs.
The lecture slides are more than enough to do well in this subject.
Lecturer(s): A lot. They were all brilliant - clear, funny, interactive.
16 lectures of Biochemistry (Terry Mulheren) - your first lecturer. Terry tends to speak pretty fast, so it's a good idea to go through his lectures again just to make sure you don't miss out on any details.
12 lectures of Genetics (Brendan Monahan, Trent Perry and Marnie Blewitt) - Brendan lectures for most of this bulk. Trent takes 2 lectures on developmental genetics and reverse genetics, Marnie takes 2 lectures for Epigenetics.
12 lectures of Cell Biology (Robb de Iongh and Gary Hime) - Robb lectures for most of this part, Gary takes 4 lectures on tissues + cell junctions. Gary tends to read off slides, but his slides can be pretty detailed anyway.
15 lectures of Microbiology/Immunology (Roy Robins Browne, Lorena Brown, Odillia Wijburg) - Roy lectures for Bacteriology, Lorena for Virology, and Odillia for Immunology. This is THE BEST part of the subject. Roy tells a lot of stories and make sure you write down EVERYTHING HE SAYS, because he will assess it even if it's not on the slides.
11 lectures of Pathology - (Vicki Lawson, Chris Hopkins, Tom Karagiannis) - Vicki lectures for most of this block. I found her notes a bit hard to follow, so make sure you listen during her lectures. Chris gives a lecture on Chronic Inflammation and Tom (who is probably the MOST relaxed lecturer, ever) gives 2 lectures on Neoplasia.
Year & Semester of completion: 2014, Semester 1
Rating: 5/5
Your Mark/Grade: H1 (94)
Comments: This subject is an awesome experience, but make no mistake, it is a stressful challenge. It is full-on, with 6-7 lectures a week. If you fall behind then you're going to have a tough time fighting back. Many students aren't used to taking a double subject, so don't make the mistake of treating it like your other subjects - you need to devote double the time do this. I don't care if you've got MSTs for Principles of Genetics or GHS, DO NOT PUT THIS SUBJECT OFF EVER. Make sure you finish summarising all of the week's lectures by the end of the week, and I guarantee you'll be fine. All of the lectures sort of follows from the last, so if you can keep up to date with things it just makes it so much easier.
One of the major reasons on why I liked this subject was its cohesiveness and integration. All of the topics link together very nicely. Cancer is obviously a major theme in the course, and it's something that's addressed in most of the topics. For example, in Biochemistry you will learn how cancer cells have an increased rate of glycolysis and therefore upregulate GLUT transporters to get more glucose. In genetics you will learn about how genetic mutations can increase the likelihood of cancer, through translocations of proto-oncogenes/tumour suppressor genes. In Cell Biology you will learn signalling pathways that stimulate/prevent proliferation of tumour cells, as well as their epithelial/mesenchymal transition. In Immunology, you will learn cancer cells can be recognised as altered self-cells by the immune system. In Pathology, you will learn about how cancers can metastasise and spread throughout the body. This is what I'm talking about by "integration" and cohesiveness. This isn't just limited to things such as cancer, but also on stuff such as MHC interactions/presentations.
Anyway, expect to learn A LOT of detail in this subject, and read over your notes from time-to-time. Cover the big ideas first, and then once you're confident with those, hone in on the small details that will hopefully make you stand out from other students.
Lectures/WorkshopsLectures are great, but make sure you re-listen to them. There's always some detail that you're likely to miss out. Since attendance isn't compulsory you can afford to just not go to them and you won't really be missing out on anything - I found that I studied better at home anyway. Later in the semester I switched from annotating the lecture slides by hand to just typing on the pdf, which I found a lot more efficient. When you type out your notes, make sure you include lots of diagrams and visuals because Paper B of the exam will require you to draw some.
Workshops are pretty much just an extra-lecture slot, where the lecturer may:
1. Go through some of the stuff in the CAL
2. Address questions they've been emailed
3. Go over lectures they haven't had time to finished
4. Cover some extended knowledge
The only workshop which I think was somewhat important was the Cell Biology one, where Rob went through some general things about cancer. Given that cancer is a pretty overarching theme of the course, make sure you at least have a look at it. Don't bother learning ALL the details that Rob specifically tells you not to.
Make it a policy of writing down everything a lecturer says unless they specifically tell you not to worry about it. ANYTHING the lecturer says can be examinable.
Mid-Semester TestsThese are not hard if you've done the work. 99.99999999% of MCB is just memorisation/recall. These are all MCQ. Either you know the answer to the question, or you don't and just have to guess. There are 2 MSTs, held in Week 6 and 11 respectively. MST1 covers Biochemistry + Genetics, MST2 covers Cell Biology + Micro/Immuno. Each of them is 30 questions long with 30-40 mins writing time. The MSTs were a bit specific, but as long as you know the details, you shouldn't lose many marks here.
Definitely do the past MSTs, because some of the questions can be pretty similar. If you're sick of reading through your notes and want to get the most out of your studying, write your own detailed solutions to the MSTs and make your own questions. Try to make those questions as specific as possible, make them hard, and try to write questions that would hypothetically require you to think through it before you can answer.
Around 1-2 weeks after the MST, you'll have a feedback lecture where the lecturer will just go a few questions from the test. They will also give you some statistics on how the cohort went. For some reason the 2014 cohort did quite well compared to previous years.
Pracs/CALsThese account for 10% of your mark and it is a pretty easy 10% to get. You get one CAL/prac per topic. Make sure you actually do the CALs even if you're not going to attend them - with the exception of Pathology, you can do all of the CALs at home. After the last group has done the topic's CAL/PRAC, a test based on the CAL will pop up on the LMS (except for Cell Biology, where the test was literally just the 1st year revision quiz we had to do BEFORE the CAL and allowed multiple attempts since you needed to get 10/10 to access CAL itself). These tests aren't hard and you shouldn't have too much trouble with them. Generally, these CALs will cover non-examinable things and it's not really necessary to go revise them. Cell Biology had some things which were relevant to cell proliferation and the Pathology CAL was pretty much just a summary of everything we had learnt, with a bit more detail to it.
The Microbiology part of the course has 2 practicals dedicated to it. These are pretty fun, they're presented like a hospital case study and you will have to find the microbe responsible for a particular infection at a hypothetical ward. Don't worry too much about this as there is no in-practical assessment - it's only assessed on the LMS test as with the other CALs. Just sit back and enjoy.
Exam AI actually felt a bit time-pressured in this exam. There are 80 MCQs, with 40 marks of fill in the blanks (10 questions, 4 marks each). You approximately have 1 mark per minute.
The exam was pretty specific, more so than the MSTs. But luckily for us there were no troll questions (someone told me that in previous years, one of the questions was which chain of the MHC molecule was closest to the membrane - now that's a troll). ALL questions were addressed in the lectures (either it was on the slide or it was said) so make sure you go through your lecture notes thoroughly and don't leave anything out. Anyway, as above, if you know your stuff you have nothing to worry about because again most of this section is just pure recall, with some occasional/rare application.
The fill in the blanks actually takes quite a bit of time, more than you might expect. Each question will have 8 parts to it, and each correct part earns you 0.5 marks. When you have 10 of these, it's going to slow you down a lot. You also have lots of options to check through, and then you also have to make sure that everything makes grammatical sense as well.
I know some people weren't able to finish this exam, so make sure absolute sure to leave questions you're unsure with for last. I was somewhat rushing and only finished with 15 mins, which wasn't enough to check through the entire paper. Make sure you check that you've inputted everything correctly because yes, it is actually pretty easy to fuck up your answer sheet.
Exam BThis paper takes place a week after the MCQ exam. It's entirely full of short-answer questions. This year, the format of the exam changed and rather than having many heavily weighted questions, we got a lot more which were only worth 0.5-6 marks. There was one 12 mark question and one 9 mark question in there too. So it sort of resembles the short-answer section of a VCE exam, with more questions which are less heavily weighted.
It's crucial that you time yourself on this exam. You should be aiming to write at a speed of 1 mark per minute, so time pressure is definitely there and you won't finish if you waste too much time thinking or having mental blanks. Take this exam as an opportunity to show off everything you know and include as much detail as possible if you have the time.
Learn to draw diagrams too. Many questions may explicitly require you to draw diagrams when appropriate. Diagrams can take up a lot of time so if you don't want to repeat yourself, draw the diagram first and then annotate it. They don't have to be Picasso, just draw a general gist of what's happening (i.e use simple shapes and shit, don't bother trying to draw the actual structure of things like desmosomes like they do in the textbook because you might not finish).
The past exam papers were much more difficult than the actual exam probably because of the different format. In the new format they actually tell you what specific detail to write so you're not left wonderinf what to include and not to include most of the time.
The final lecture in this subject tells you which of the topics will be "integrated", which does let to somewhat predict what they'll be. For example, if Genetics/Cell Biology/Pathology is integrated, you can expect that the topic is going to be about cancer. There was no Microbiology listed as part of the integration topics and none of it was on the exam too. With that being said, study everything as you can use your knowledge from other areas of the course and perhaps use it as an example if you can (admittedly I didn't really do this).
I studied for this exam pretty much just by looking over my notes occasionally and writing as many detailed answers I could for any processes that were likely to occur over and over and over. Memorising your responses could increase your speed and at least you'll know all the details.
Final remarksI loved this subject because it gave you so much broad exposure to a number of different topics. There's a lot to know, but you'll often have epiphany moments like "OH NOW I UNDERSTAND HOW MHC-II IS PRODUCED AND SECRETED TO THE PLASMA MEMBRANE IN THE RIGHT ORIENTATION". It clicks, and nothing feels hugely discontinuous from the other.
What's important is that there is a LOT of content to know but the concepts are not hard to understand. So as long as you manage your time well, this subject is not as bad as it seems. I also think the faculty is tweaking the subject and making assessment slightly easier to reduce the fail rates of previous years.
Pathology is probably the hardest part of the course since there is a LOT of content packed into a short number of lectures. Read over it quite a bit since it's going to take a bit of time to get your head around it.
Tips for doing well in this subject:
1. Summarise every lecture immediately with lecture diagrams, and note down EVERYTHING the lecture says unless they specifically say that its not necessary.
2. Find some people and have some quiz-offs. This is actually immensely helpful for improving your memory/recall. When I looked over every topic for the first time it was easy to feel overwhelmed. Asking and answering questions is a nice change from just passively reading. Refer to your notes if you don't know the answer. I reckon this was the fastest and most efficient way of studying - combined with passive reading, after a day or two I would be able to recall 2 topics without much trouble.
3. Make your own questions and make them as detailed and tricky as possible. Try to make them emulate the MSTs in style, but make them harder in difficulty. Change one small detail in an option to make it wrong. Try to make the obvious answers incorrect. And if you can, try integrate your questions so they draw on knowledge from different topics.
4. Write solutions to all practise tests that you do, explaining why each answer is right and wrong.
5. When practising for your SAQs, it might be useful to write out the entire process again and again to memorise it.
6. Jot down the gaps in your knowledge on a small notepad. Make it function as a logbook of all your forgotten details. I put these on my phone and would look over it days before the exams. This is so you don't forget them again.
The course has changed quite a bit since 2013 - a lot of Genetics has been cut and replaced with some 1-2 filler lectures (such as the ENCODE project and genetic therapy, which are unlikely to be examined). The other parts of the subject seem to remain the same. I'm going to quote stonecold's review and just add in stuff that's changed.
Biochemistry
- Know the amino acids, single letter codes, three letter codes, resonance structures, properties and how to draw peptides and how the amino acids interact with one another.
- Understand the chemical interactions involved and basic thermodynamics and be able to explain them.
- Know the Ramachandran plot, as well as all of the properties of b-sheets and a-helices, including how to draw a rough schematic.
- Know every step, including enzymes and cofactors, of glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, glycogenolysis, glycogenesis, TCA cycle, electron transport chain as well as a few other reactions which you are given. You need to be able to recognize and name all of the molecules, but not draw them.
- Have a solid understanding of enzyme kinetics.
- Know all of the signalling pathways relating to glucogon, insulin, adrenaline etc.
- Know all of the diseases discussed in this part of the course.
Genetics
- Know the key structures of chromosomes and how they are replicated.
- Learn all the steps in transcription and translation, contrasting prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
- Know the relevance of epigenetic marks and how they affect gene expression.
- Make sure you understand tumour supressor genes and how you can identify them.
- Make sure you know about the types of mutations which can lead to cancer (oncogenic/tumour suppressor), and how some of these can be treated. There is a big emphasis on Myc translocation and BCR-ABL fusion.
- The lac operon as well as other types of positively and negatively acting transcriptional systems are important to understandand at a conceptual level.
- Know about developmental pathways - make sure you understand the maternal effect and understand how the anterior-posterior axis is determined. Also learn about how Hox genes affect development.
- Understand the concepts of complementation testing, forward genetics and reverse genetics (such as the GAL4:UAS system).
- At least know about Sanger Sequencing and general ideas of modern-genetic technology. You don't need to know ALL techniques, but know what the ENCODE project wants to do, as well as the features of Next-Gen sequencing.
Suppressor mutations always come up in a big question in the final exam.Be able to interpret gels, as they are bound to come up somewhere
Cell Biology
- Understand the concept of topology.
- Know the various mechanisms and processes by which proteins are trafficked around the cell, including the steps and diagrams.
- Know all the properties and features of the cytoskeleton (actin filaments, intermediate filaments and microtubules).
- Know all the details of epithelial tissue including cell junctions and the electron micrographs which are given in the slides.
- Understand all of the features of connective tissue, includuing fibrous proteins, adhesive proteins and proteoglycans.
- Know all of the signalling pathways which you get taught in detail, including how to draw them. The important ones seem to be MAPK, Wnt/b-catenin and TGFb signalling. Explain how these pathways cause cancer.
- Explain the characteristics of epithelial to mesenchymal cell transition, which is the transformation of benign growths to malginant tumours.
Micro/Immunology
- Know all of the features of bacteria, and how they contribute to virulence, including the experiemental evidence for this, especially toxins, fimbriae and capsids.
- Know examples and charactersitics of lots of different bacteria with different features. Roy's favourite's are Clostridium sp. and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Make sure you note down ALL of the bacteria he says
- Know how bacteria are classified both in the lab and also how species/subspecies are determined.
- Know how different drugs work against bacteria and the mechnisms of the ones which you are taught.
- Know the viral life cycle, including examples for different types of viruses (ss/dsDNA and ss/dsRNA) and how they replicate.
- Know some antiviral drugs and how they work.
- Know the details of polio virus, poliomyelitis and how the Salk and Sabin vaccines vary in prevention of contracting Polio.
- Understand how the innate immune system operates, and the key effectors, especially the complement system.
- Understand the mechanisms and effector cells of humoral and cell mediated immunity.
- Be able to describe how antibodies and T-cell receptors are generated.
- Know the structure of antibodies, T-cell receptors and MHC molecules to the level of detail given in the slides.
- Be able to explain the mechanisms by which pathogens evade the immune system and provide examples of such pathogens.
Pathology
- Know the different types of necrosis.
- Know the different types of cell adaptations.
- Know the difference between necrosis and apoptosis and the causes/pathways for each.
- Know the cause, process, regulation, characteristics and types of acute inflammation.
- Know all of the different types of hypersensitivities and the examples given for each.
- Understand the basis for an excessive immune response and immune deficiencies, as well as examples (e.g. allergy, AIDS).
- Understand the process of transplant rejection.
- Understand the different cells types and their capacity to regenerate.
- Know the process of wound healing by regeneration and by repair using connective tissue, as well as the repair process for cutaneous wounds and the complications which may arise.
- Understand the mechanism and characteristics of chronic inflammation, as well as the causes and macroscopic appearance.
- Understand the transformation, causes and epidemiology of cancer. Be able to appreciate and explain the genetic and cellular changes which occur in cancer cells.
- Describe the properties of cancer cells, and how these can be exploited to identify cancer masses.
- Be familiar with the signalling pathways that may cause cancer.
- Understand how cancers are graded and described.
- Understand the selective pressures that influence metastasis in cancer.
- Understand the linear progression and parallel progession models of cancer.
[/list][/list]