All about cells—A Biomedicine Course Review

30 January, 2020

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…

A teacher pointing to a projected screen in the background, with a device screen showing "Science in the Classroom" in the foreground. The subheading is "Annotated research papers and accompanying teaching materials — One of the first classes, where we discussed how to break down and analyze scientific papers. /Inika Prasad

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

A page of notes with "STEM CELLS" in the center with letters in different colours and a heart between the two words. — Some people might have a bit of a fascination with these cells /Lukas Lehtonen

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

Four pictures of cells in an image manipulation software on a computer screen. Three pictures are red, blue, and green from fluorescent tags and the last image is an overlap of the first three. A person's hand holds the mouse, — In the Biomedicum Imaging Core, where we explored the slides we had made in the labs on really nice fluroscent microscopes. /Inika Prasad

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.

A slide in the pre-exhibition presentation that told us the materials we’d be provided with for the presentation. Because honestly, sometimes one needs the clarification. /Inika Prasad

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 ❤️

Hello, Inika here. I’m a third-year Biomedicine bachelor’s student at KI. I'm from India and a little bit from Sweden. As a Digital Ambassador Blogger, I'll be writing about my programme, things happening in and around KI, and giving insights into university life.

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