Student blogs

Cells are the smallest units of life. They come in dazzling variety, and in the Cell, Stem Cell, and Developmental Biology course we learned a lot about them.

Amongst others, some of the most interesting things were…

• how bacteria have sex 🦠
• how to turn your skin cells into heart cells (or any other cells!)
• why in the world a zebrafish (or a worm, or a fly) is a suitable model for studying humans🐟
• when a lion and tiger breed, the size of the mother determines the size of the cub. 🐅🐆
• neural crest cells are our embryology lecturer’s favourite cells
• we have so much ”useless” DNA that our cells’ occasionally careless DNA repair mechanisms don’t bother us🧬
• etc

So as you can tell, I had an absolutely great time. This was one of my favourite courses. We had lectures, labs, a visit to Biomedicum imaging facilities, a project, and an exhibition.

Since this course made me learn in so many different ways, I thought I’d adopt a blog post format that challenges your expectations too. So I’m going to take you on a journey through this course in pictures! 📷🎞

One of the first days of class…

Some people might’ve gotten a bit enthusiastic about the note taking😂

After our various labs we ended up with slides that we took to the Biomedicum Imaging Core…

And the grand finale of the course, after the exam, was the exhibition! We had some prepartory lectures, a whole day of arts and crafts, and a morning of fika and conversation about the different topics in the room.

Here we stitch together the beginning and the end of the course, using a scientific paper to deepen our understanding of how different cells play a role in Alzheimer’s Disease.

And with that we come to the end of this little tour! You can always find more details about the course online.

Cheers,

Inika ❤️