Online Biology Summer Course for GCSE and pre-A level Students
1-31 July 2025 and 18-29 August 2025
Audience:
Students in Year 10-12 aimed for further Biology study.
Goals:
· Develop a holistic view of nature: understand how the living world exists, functions, and evolves.
· Refresh, systematize, and broaden students' understanding of fundamental natural principles.
· Cultivate a scientific approach for further studies and research.
Classes:
Ten Online Zoom conferences held twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5 and 7 PM since 1 July till 31 July, or on weekdays at 5 and 7 PM since 18 till 29 August.
Each session lasts 1.5 hours.
Small groups of students, up to 10 people per group.
Tutor:
Ruslan Arinenko PhD (Biology), MS (Chemistry)
Course fee £199
Syllabus
Session 1: How do eggs differ from stones?
ü What is Life? How can we differentiate living beings from inert matter? Discussion on traits and features of living beings: reactivity (including motility); matter and energy exchange (including homeostasis); reproduction and inheritance with variations; and evolution.
ü How is a living being built? Cells (including various types); single-celled and multicellular life. Cell interactions and communities.
ü Reactivity and motion in single-celled organisms: amoebas, flagellates, and ciliates.
ü Motion in immobile beings: how plants can move.
Session 2: Life: Moving towards happiness, escaping dangers.
ü Motion in multicellular organisms. The capability to contract itself – basis for muscles.
ü How soft-bodied animals move: jellyfish, worms, slugs. Liquid skeleton of roundworms.
ü Hard-bodied beings: external and internal skeletons. Muscular limbs for locomotion in insects, crabs, spiders, and vertebrates (fishes and tetrapods).
ü Mechanics of movement: forces, pivot point, lever.
ü Living rockets: reactive propulsion in animals, plants and fungi.
ü Living Hydraulics in plants (turgor and transpiration) and in animals (echinoderms and arthropods).
ü How to overcome gravity: flying animals and plants. Passive and active flight. How wings work.
ü Super flyers: seabirds and flying fishes can fly both in the air and in water.
Session 3: Get hungry? Recharge your internal battery!
ü Energy source for life: food - where to find it and how to use it effectively.
ü How we differ from plants (autotrophs vs. heterotrophs).
ü Matter and energy exchange in living systems. Global energy transfer from the Sun through Biosphere and back to Space.
ü Metabolic pathways. Photosynthesis and respiration. Composing and decomposing: two profitable approaches.
Session 4: To Eat a neighbor or to ally with it?
ü Eaters’ societies: Food chains and webs.
ü Ecology in essence: how living beings create societies. Cooperation vs. competition.
ü Lifestyle: to be egoistic or to be altruistic.
ü Symbiosis: mutualism – win-win strategy in microbes, plants, fungi, and animals.
ü Sharing is caring. Of Me… Is parasitism always nasty?
ü Sustainable systems: biobalance and biodiversity.
Session 5: E Pluribus Unum – One out of many.
ü How single cell began to live together: communities and colonies.
ü Eukaryotic cell as a communal from of life.
ü Further development of cooperation: multicellular life forms.
ü New challenge: how to orchestrate complex multicellular organism.
ü Homeostasis and regulation – transferring information between cells.
ü Chemical communication – hormones. Slow but reliable.
ü Endocrine system and essential regulation of complex life.
ü Nervous system – lightnings travelling among cells. Fast and targeted messaging.
Session 6: Sensing the world.
ü How sensory systems developed and evolved.
ü Sensing without nervous system: unicellulars.
ü What and how we may sense. Human optical, auditory, tactile, and chemical sensors.
ü Same prototype but quite a different functioning: sensors in plants and animals.
ü Not like us: How to detect invisible light, magnetic fields and electricity.
ü Transferring and analyzing the signals from sensors – how to create an image of the world.
ü Our world is just our imagination of it. Does reality exist?
Session 7: To Protect and to Serve.
ü Open world of microbes versus closed system of eukaryotes. Why do we need to protect ourselves.
ü Life on frontier: Eternal war
ü Evil Invaders and unwanted migrants: pathogens
ü How the immune system controls legal citizens and eliminates all the suspicious.
ü Innate and adaptive immunity.
ü When something goes wrong: your own cells turn into enemies – cancer.
ü Mutiny in the armed forces. Attacking the host - autoimmunity.
ü Mistaken protection: fighting against imported goods - Allergy.
Session 8: Magna Carta of Life: Genome
ü The cell’s internal manual: How to build up, to run and to reproduce a living being.
ü What type of information does a genome contain?
ü How genetic information is encoded and written down. Gene library organization – how to manage DNA and chromosomes.
ü How to read genetic information: Transcription and Translation.
ü Gene interactions: assembling a human or chimpanzee from the same building blocks.
ü Recode and reprogram yourself: artificial gene modifications.
Session 9: We will never be the same.
ü Sexual and asexual reproduction of life. Inheritance. Why does life need variations? Eternal adaptation to constant environmental changes.
ü How to rewrite the Book of Life: genes must change. Mutations – inevitable amendments to instructions. Natural selection of new gene versions.
ü The Sexual process: speeding up evolution. Gene transfer and exchange. Horizontal and Vertical gene transfer.
ü Sex in Bacteria, Unicellulars, Plants and Animals
ü Endless chain of generations: the germ line. Your distant great granny was a bacterium.
Session 10: Life as a Planet Engineering Force.
ü First life on Earth. Biocenoses and the creation of the biosphere.
ü Life as a global force modifying Earth. Thriving and crisis periods throughout Earth’s history. The recent Ice Age and present warming.
ü Humankind as a new geological player (atmospheric carbon, climate change, energy industry, and closed-cycle economy).