Microbiology & Statistics

Presentation

Programme (detailed contents):

Microbiology

Cellular biology of microorganisms: Overview of microbial world, Prokaryotes (structure and function), Eukaryotes (structure and functions), Nutrition and growth, virus

Classification and identification: Principles of classification, Methods of identification, Panorama of microbial world,

Industrial applications: Description of a typical microbiological industrial chain.

Water treatment and microorganisms, Negative implications of microbial activities

Statistics

Exploratory data analysis; distributions and relationship between data: indices, histograms, box and whiskers, correlation, scatter plots. Theory and practice of estimation and introduction to statistical inference: notions of probabilities, confidence intervals and testing of hypothesis, parametric and non parametric tests. Introduction to statistical modelling: regression ; estimation, test and diagnostic

Organisation:

Lectures in microbiology; Lab work in microbiology completed by a statistical analysis of the data.; Lectures in statistics + tutorials based on examples issued form food microbiology of microbilogy of ecosystems.

Main difficulties for students:

New lexical and methodological fields sometimes integrated with difficulties but necessary to understand the lectures and solve the problems.

Objectives

At the end of this module, the student will have understood and be able to explain (main concepts):

Microbiology

Structure of procaryotes and eucaryotes. Reproduction. Nutrition. Notion of metabolism. Growth analysis. Methods of classification and identification. Industrial applications.

Statistics

Statistical variables, statistical sampling, distributions of statistical variables and relationships between variables, Probabilistic models and parameter estimations. Confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, linear model diagnostics

The student will be able to:

Describe the role of microorganisms in life cycles. Describe the structure and functions of cell components. Grow and count microorganisms.  Manage the methods used to investigate microorganism classification and characterization.

Describe the industrial compounds produced by microorganisms and the methods of water treatment. Describe the products of industrial microbiology and the water treatment techniques. Translate a biological question in a statistical assumption. Manage, explore and model biological data sets with a statistical software. Define and use the relevant statistical test and control the answer reliability.

Needed prerequisite

Structural biochemistry and molecular biology notions. Linear algebra and real analysis

Form of assessment

The evaluation of outcome prior learning is made as a continuous training during the semester. According ot the teaching, the assessment will be different: as a written exam, an oral exam, a record, a written report, peers review...

Additional information

Microorganisms, cellular biology, prokaryote and eukaryote cells, classifications, statistics, probability