Reflection
I never thought cell biology was particularly relevant to me. My formal education is in conservation biology and ecology, and so the cellular level never seemed super interesting to me. I taught general biology labs for almost three years, which made the information quite accessible to me, since I used to teach most of it. For example, cellular respiration, photosynthesis, and cell division were all topics I used to actually teach, and now I got to learn about them again more formally. When I taught them, I thought I knew everything about them. After (and during) taking this course, I quickly learned that there are always more details to most subjects in biology. For example, even though I taught photosynthesis, we dove into much more detail in this course than when I taught it, since we learned every specific substrate of the Kreb’s Cycle and the associated enzyme with each step.
This semester I also took anatomy and physiology with lab, and so there was significant overlap with that course. We learned all different types of cells in A&P, which mirrored what I learned in this class. In fact, sometimes I found it hard to remember which content belonged to which class. However, A&P focused more on the function of the cells, which helped me apply the details I learned in this cell biology course to the broader organism. For example, we just learned about gap junctions, which are crucial to the functioning of cells that need to communicate rapidly. In my A&P class, we learned about muscle cells and how a power stroke is formed, which starts with the uptake of calcium ions into the muscle fibers and is facilitated by gap junctions.