Subject Code/Name: IMM2011 - Basic immunology: The body's defence system Workload: 3 weekly 1 hour lectures, one 3 hour lab every second week, one 2 hour tutorial every other week.
Assessment:: Mid-semester MCQ exam worth 10%, final exam is worth 60%, tutorials/labs/lab reports make up 30%. The mid Semester was relatively difficult, there’s only 1 lab report for the unit which is worth roughly 3-4% of total mark. Participation makes up roughly 10% of total mark. There’s also an oral presentation, which makes up roughly 4-5% of your total mark iirc.
Recorded Lectures: Yes.
Past exams available: Yes, several available. As well as general glossary mc. The exam was harder than all practice material provided.
Textbook Recommendation: Basic Immunology: Function and Disorders of the Immune system, 4th edition by Abbas. The textbook is extremely useful, but not necessary at all. Most lecturers will tell you that they’re only going to examine/only care about what is in their slides. That said, I’d recommend picking up a copy, it’s a short and concise (approx. 300pgs.) book that really does help to make sense of the immune system. That said, if you don’t have a background in biology the textbook may as well have been written in Chinese, since there is no introduction given to biological concepts, terminology, etc.
Lecturer(s): Several, I’d say Dr Kim Murphy, and A/P Frank Alderuccio are the key lecturers.
Year & Semester of completion: Semester 1, 2014
Rating: 4 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: HD
Comments: Put bluntly, many people struggle with this unit, for example, the average mid-sem MCQ result was 65%. There’s an awful lot of content to get through, and the complexity and interconnected nature of the immune system is thrown at you in a way that is seemingly disconnected and it's up to you to make those connections.
That said, this is an extremely interesting unit. The immune system is vast and complex, and can be quite difficult to grasp in its entirety. Topics covered include the innate immune system, immune signalling, the adaptive immune response, the connection between innate and adaptive immunity, immunological techniques, mucosal immunity, and so on.
The entire purpose of this unit is to allow you to appreciate the immune system, and beyond several key cytokines, cells, molecules, and structures, doesn’t really dig deeper into the complexities of it. Nor does it give a context for the role of immunology, and the immune system in health and disease.
The lectures themselves are hit and miss, because of either the lecturer, the topic, or both. The important part is that you have to
adjust your study routine based on which lecturer is lecturing, specifically for two lecturers.
The first is A/P Frank Alderuccio, Frank is an excellent presenter, he isn’t afraid to walk around the room, ask questions, or reward students for correct answers. However, Frank will tell you that you don’t need to know much detail, and his slides will reflect this, ignore him. If you want to do well, make sure that any time he says “you might want to know one or two of these”, you
know all of them. Especially when it comes to the complement system, and key cytokines. But also for Pattern Recognition Receptors, mainly TLRs but I’d also recommend learning about NLRs and key DAMPs for NLRs. If you don’t know those words, don’t worry, you’ll be taught them. The
key thing to take away for Frank is that you need to go beyond him and his slides. Frank also gives the two final revision lecturers, these are mostly pointless and most people don’t go to the second one.
The second is A/P Robyn Slattery, Robyn is both a wonderful lecturer, and a wonderful person. You will enjoy her lectures and really should go to all of them. The
key thing to know about Robyn is that you need to know every single detail that is on her slides. She’ll make this pretty clear, but you really do need to know her slides inside out.
In terms of the other lecturers, A/P Mark Wright was probably my favourite, he’s funny, relatable, and makes complicated topics quite accessible. He gives a lecture on signal transduction that you really should go to if you don’t do any biochem. Make sure you know the pathways he goes over, you’ll see variations of them appear in B-cells later on, and the concept of transduction is applicable to basically everything in this unit/most of biology.
The worst lecturer was probably Dr Rose Ffrench, who lectures on humeral immunity. She is clearly very knowledgeable, but her presentation style is unbearable for two reasons. The first is that she has a monotone voice, the second is that she struggles to breathe and this will put you on edge. She was the only lecturer whose lectures I purposefully avoided, because they were simply unbearable.
The labs and tutorials rotate every week, so one week you will do a lab, and the second a tutorial. This is a problematic set up, as it creates a divide between the tutorial, and whatever it is you learned that week in the lectures.
The tutorials were generally quite enjoyable, however I assume that depends on the tutor. Each tutorial has an assessment essay at the end of session, and each is worth about 1 or 2 percent of your total mark. They’re open book so you shouldn’t struggle too much with the content.
The labs were so and so. I personally found labs involving microscopy to be the most fun, this involved histology of generative and peripheral lymphoid organs, and examining the cells of the immune system. The assessment task for these are normally done as homework, and can be quite challenging. Some maths is occasionally involved in this, but if you watch the lab calculations videos on moodle you’ll be fine. The labs tend to be relevant to an extent, e.g. the MHC restriction prac, and the blood typing prac, but overall they’re more relevant to immunological techniques, e.g. ELISAs.
Overall, this unit provided a pretty decent introduction to the immune system, while still being fairly accessible to most student.