Physiology is an integral component of any medical curriculum. Traditionally, the learning of physiology has relied heavily on systems-based didactic lectures. In 2001, the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine (NRMSM; Durban, South Africa) embarked on a problem-based curriculum in which the learning of physiology was integrated with relevant clinical scenarios. Students are expected to gain an ...

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Populations of metabolically active bacteria were associated at an electrode surface via vapor-deposition of silica to facilitate in situ characterization of bacterial physiology and bio-electrocatalytic activity in microbial fuel cells.

Resting membrane potential is one of the most difficult physiological concepts that students must master. Although the upper-division undergraduates in my physiology course have completed a semester of neurophysiology in which they worked problems using the Nernst and Goldman equations, they often fail to retain conceptual understanding of the underlying phenomena. I developed the following que...

1 Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Bioresources of Saline Soils, Provincial Key Laboratory of Agrobiology, Institute of Agro-Biotechnology, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing 210014, China 2Key Laboratory of Coastal Biology & Bioresources Utilization, Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research (YIC), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Yantai 264003, China 3Cancer and Genetics Research C...

Aim Precipitation controls the production of semi-arid plants through various mechanisms that operate at a range of time-scales. Short-term variation in precipitation affects vegetation through adjustments in plant physiology and leaf phenology, whereas long-term effects are mediated by plant establishment and mortality, community composition and disturbance regimes. Our goal is to use remote s...

Soil organic matter (SOM) and the carbon and nutrients therein drive fundamental submicron- to global-scale biogeochemical processes and influence carbon-climate feedbacks. Consensus is emerging that microbial materials are an important constituent of stable SOM, and new conceptual and quantitative SOM models are rapidly incorporating this view. However, direct evidence demonstrating that micro...

Aim: Soil water is essential for the physiological processes of plant growth and fitness. Owing to the difficulty of assessing wide variations in soil water reserves, plant distribution models usually estimate available water for plants through such climatic proxies as precipitation data (P) or climatic water balance (P minus potential evapotranspiration). We evaluated the ability of simple cli...

The discoveries over the last decade have demonstrated that microbiology is a central scientific discipline with practical applications in agriculture, medicine, bioremediation, biotechnology, engineering, and other fields. It is clear that the roles of microbes in nature are so diverse that the process of mining this genetic variation for new applications will continue long into the future. Mo...