PHYSIOLOGY  468b

 

Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course will be offered in Winter 2007. There will be an enrolment limit of 50 students.

 

This is an advanced course in regulation of cellular communication. Topics will cover physiological mechanisms involved in activation and regulation of glutamatergic and GABAergic synapses, synaptic plasticity, and signal transduction pathways of G-protein coupled receptors. While these classes of receptors and signaling pathways are common to many cell types and regulate a wide-range of physiological processes, specific examples relevant to neuron function will be used as appropriate.

 

The course is team taught, with three professors, and involves student  presentation and discussion of research articles from the scientific literature. Evaluation of student performance will include a midterm test (40%), marks for presentation (20%), and a final examination (40%).  Students will be paired randomly and assigned to present on a particular date. The midterm test and final examination will consist of essay and short-answer style questions. Other than lectures given by the instructors, students are expected to know the main results of the papers presented. Lecture materials will be posted on WebCT, which is only accessible to registered students.

 

Papers to be used for students’ presentations will be distributed at the class prior to presentation (i.e., at least one week before). Presentations should be 20 minutes in duration, during which time the objectives and background of the research, relevant experimental methodology and results, as well as summary of observations and conclusions are to be described. Particular attention should focus on the physiological mechanisms studied. Discussion of the content of each paper (involving the student presenter) will last for 5-0 minutes following each paper. After each presentation, the student(s) is/are required to submit a summary of the talk, to be posted on the web site. The summary should contain the hypothesis, objectives, brief methods and main results of the paper. Students who did not submit a summary within 4 days of the presentation will lose marks (maximum 5%). Students are required to sign up for paper presentations during the first two weeks of class.  Either power point or transparency overheads may be used for presentation.  There will be no advantage of using power point or overheads.

 

Course Manager:       Dr. L. Stan Leung MSB236;    850-2400 Email: sleung@uwo.ca

Instructors:              Dr. Donglin Bai          DSB Addition Rm 00073; 850-2569  Email:donglin.bai@fmd.uwo.ca

Dr. Steve Ferguson     RI 3-03; 663-3825 Email: ferguson@robarts..ca