BIOL 2420
Microbiology
Disease agents, signs and symptoms, the people who worked it out, how atoms bond, how molecules cross membranes, the eukaryotic microbes, how microbes capture energy and make ATP, how they grow, DNA and DNA replication, transcription and translation, recombination, antibiotic resistance, and innate and adaptive immunity.
Games for this course
Free to play · progress saves in this browser
Blackthorn: Quarantine
A quarantined institute, five sealed wings, and things in the dark that ask questions before they let you pass. Collect the seals, answer the custodian, and get out.
Playable nowViral Ward: The Last Diagnosis
An outbreak ward, and you are the nurse practitioner on shift. Examine each patient, then name the disease, the virus and how it spread. Get all three right to save them and win a piece of the mystery picture. Miss one, and things get a little undead.
Playable nowImmune League: The Blue ID Card Conspiracy
Follow Dendra from infected tissue to the lymph node. Read the clues in each manga panel and make six decisions about how innate and adaptive immune cells respond to a virus.
Guided Learning with Simulations
Predict, explore, check · progress saves in this browser
Chemical Bonding Simulation
Build atoms shell by shell, then share, transfer and tug on electrons with Bohr models. Seven guided stations run from energy shells to covalent, ionic and hydrogen bonds, and the Van der Waals grip that holds a gecko to glass.
Playable nowMembrane Discovery Simulation
Drag oxygen, water, glucose and ions across a phospholipid bilayer to see what gets through, and why. Then add transport proteins and watch diffusion play out across a concentration gradient.
Playable nowDiffusion & Osmosis Simulation
Predict first, then watch the molecules. Six guided stations follow diffusion, osmosis, the fluid mosaic, transport proteins, animal and plant cells in different solutions, and bulk transport.
Playable nowBIOL2420 Unit 2A Ch05: Review with Simulation
Where eukaryotic microbes fit, then protozoa, parasitic helminths and fungi. Work through clinical case files, sort the groups by their features, follow each life cycle, and finish with an exam check.
Playable nowBIOL2420 Unit 2B Ch08: Review with Simulation
Build an enzyme, run the dam that makes ATP, and follow glucose through respiration and fermentation. Eleven guided stations cover Chapter 8 and end with an exam check.
Playable nowOxidative Phosphorylation Simulation
Follow electrons through redox reactions, build a proton gradient, and make ATP. Seven guided stations connect oxidative phosphorylation with glycolysis and the citric acid cycle.
Playable nowBIOL2420 Unit 2C Ch09: Review with Simulation
Grow a population and read the growth curve, count cells by dilution and plating, and see how oxygen, pH, temperature, salt and pressure decide where microbes live. Ends with clinical case files on the pathogens of Chapter 9.
Playable nowTranscription
Find a gene, label its promoter, coding region and terminator, and pick the right RNA polymerase. Then run initiation, elongation and termination base by base, in a eukaryote or a bacterium, and read the RNA you made.
Playable nowTranslation
Dock the ribosome on the mRNA, slide it to the start codon, and bring in the tRNA that matches each codon. Form peptide bonds, translocate, and let a release factor end the chain, all in a 3D model of the ribosome.
Playable nowAntibiotics Resistant Bacteria Simulation
Watch neutrophils and an antibiotic take on a mix of resistant and non-resistant bacteria. Compare the immune system alone, stopping the pills early, and finishing the full eight-day course, and see which bacteria are left.
Playable nowRecombination Lab
Follow two linked genes through meiosis. Copy the DNA, exchange chromosome segments by crossing over, and track the alleles into four gametes to see how new combinations come from alleles that were already there.
Playable nowInnate Defense Simulation
Start at the first line of defense: eyelashes, tears, mucus and cilia, skin, sweat, sebum and the resident microbes. Then follow a needle stick from the breached barrier through cytokine alarms, mast cells, neutrophils leaving the vessel, phagocytosis and complement, to macrophage clean-up, and link each step to the cardinal signs.
ConceptNavi
Guided review, station by station · progress saves in this browser
BIOL2420 Unit 3A Part 1 Ch10–11: DNA & DNA Replication
Zoom from a genome down to one gene, build nucleotides and a double helix, compare DNA with RNA, follow plasmids through a culture, run a replication fork, and find out why chromosomes need telomeres.
Playable nowBIOL2420 Unit 4A Ch17 Part 1: Barriers & Chemical Defenses
Follow innate and adaptive responses to a cut, sort defenses by line and kind, stop the cilia of an airway, watch antibiotics let C. difficile take over the gut, drop tears with lysozyme on Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, see interferon protect a sheet of cells, and start the complement cascade.
Playable nowBIOL2420 Unit 4A Ch17 Part 2: Cellular Defense, Blood & Lymphatics
Send lymph one way along the lymphatic highway, tell plasma from serum, follow hematopoiesis from the embryo to the adult and down the myeloid and lymphoid lines, meet the leukocytes, let a natural killer cell check the MHC class I badge, and read patients’ WBC differentials.
Playable nowBIOL2420 Unit 4A Ch17 Part 3: Inflammation, Phagocytosis & Fever
Run the events of inflammation around a splinter and link each cardinal sign to its cause, follow infections to resolution, an abscess or a granuloma, guide a neutrophil through every step of phagocytosis, coat encapsulated bacteria with opsonins, and reset the hypothalamus to start and stop a fever.