BIOL 303
Sensory Biology
Last Offered Spring 2007
Division III
This course is not offered in the current catalog or this is a previous listing for a current course.

How are important conditions or changes in the environment received and transduced by organisms? We will examine the molecular and cellular bases of the transduction and encoding of physical phenomena such as light, sound,forces and chemicals in a variety of organisms. The focus will be on questions such as: What properties of the physical world are sensed (and which ones are ignored)? What mechanisms are used to convert physical or chemical energy into a changed biological state within a cell? What are the consequences of this changed state? How are differences in the attributes of one modality in the physical world represented by differences in molecular and cellular processes? Among the examples we will consider are: a comparison of visual structures and pigments in bacteria, arthropods, molluscs, and primates, sound transduction and its musical consequences, and the olfactory system of mammals.