Introduction and Organization – Launching Pad for Cell Biology

00:01 So here we are standing on the launching pad for our course in cell biology.

00:07 In this lecture, I'd like to take a moment to just introduce you to the scope of this course.

00:12 What is it that we're going to be covering in the course as well as discovering the hierarchy of life and the relative size of the cells that we're going to be dealing with.

00:22 And establishing a difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.

00:28 And finally, how these cells maintain their internal environments separate from the external environment.

00:35 Let's begin by taking a look at the two modules of the course. First of all, we'll be covering some cell biology.

00:43 And then we'll move on into the genetics module of the course.

00:46 During the cell biology module, we'll be looking at the chemical building blocks of life.

00:51 Starting at the very base. Chemistry, atoms, molecules. And then we'll put all these atoms and molecules together to produce the cell. And we're going to look at cell structures and functions, and then how cells divide and reproduce.

01:09 And once we understand how cells divide and reproduce, we can talk about cell communications.

01:14 How they interact with each other to create a whole organism. And finally, we'll be able to venture into energy and metabolism.

01:22 So how cells procure fuels in order to produce energy and exists as living systems.

01:30 In the second module of the course, we'll embark on an exploration of genetics.

01:34 Beginning with the discovery of heredity by Mendel and then moving on into the structures of chromosomes and epigenetics, how some material and chromosomes is modulating the expression of chromosomes themselves.

01:50 And we'll move into DNA and gene expression. So transcription and translation.

01:56 All the details of how we move from DNA to the expression in proteins.

02:03 Once we have a good understanding of that, we'll be in a good position to move on to discuss biotechnology techniques.

02:09 Things like genetic engineering and DNA fingerprinting.

02:13 And then finally, we'll be able to move on and look at genomics. Genomics is a huge growing field at this present time in which we'll see not only the sequence of the genome but in addition what each part of the genome does in modulating itself.

02:34 We'll be beginning with the atom, the smallest level of biology. We put atoms together to form molecules.

02:41 And molecules together to form macromolecules.

02:44 As we have our macromolecules coming together, we'll be able to build cell organelles.

02:49 Organelles will come together so we can look at the whole cell.

02:53 Once we get inside the whole cell, we'll be able to investigate how those things come together to become tissues.

02:59 Communication between cells is really important for them to aggregate as tissues.

03:05 And beyond that, tissues come together to form organs. And organs-organs systems.

03:11 And then we really step outside of the human body, beyond the organism, into population.

03:17 So many of the same organism. And many organisms, just like cells interact with each other, interact to form communities. Communities of organisms come together to form ecosystem.

03:30 Ecosystems come together to form biomes.

03:33 And finally, at the largest level of life, we look at the biosphere.