Fundamentals of Microbiology Laboratory

Course Description

Fundamentals of Microbiology Laboratory is an introductory microbiology laboratory course for non-science majors specifically designed to meet the microbiology pre-requisite requirement for the 4 year BSN degree. It focuses on basic microbiological techniques relating to isolating, growing, and identifying medically significant microorganisms, with exercises including microscopy and staining techniques; asepsis and culturing of microorganisms; appropriate handling techniques, including sterilization and disinfection; and methods of enumeration and identification of bacteria. UWF states emphasis will be placed on those concepts and methods that are significant in the medical setting, and that a material and supply fee will be assessed.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MCB is the Microbiology prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 1 semester hour through the Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, College of Health. It is offered at approximately 2 Florida institutions.

⚠⚠ Register for this at the same time as the lecture, and confirm your programme requires it — almost all nursing programmes do. UWF publishes it as a separate course with its own number, so it is possible to enrol in the lecture and accidentally omit the laboratory. That mistake costs a term.

The skills here are the ones a nurse actually uses, and UWF says so — emphasis on what is significant in the medical setting. Aseptic technique, understanding why a sterile field stops being sterile, and knowing what a culture and sensitivity report is telling you are daily clinical competencies, not academic exercises.

⚠ This laboratory will change how you think about hand hygiene. Culturing your own hands before and after washing is a standard early exercise and it is more persuasive than any lecture on the subject.

Expect to work on the laboratory's schedule rather than your own. Bacteria grow overnight, so plates set up on one day are read on another — ask in week one whether the course requires returning between sessions, because it usually does.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites and co-requisites, and fee notices. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the convention established for science laboratories at UWF — 45 contact hours for 1 semester hour, matching the live EVR2001L and OCE1001L. A 1-credit science laboratory meeting three hours a week across a fifteen-week term reaches 45, which is the usual shape for a microbiology laboratory in particular, since culture work cannot be compressed. Confirm the meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Apply microbiological safety practice and biosafety level 1 and 2 precautions.
• Apply aseptic technique reliably in transfer and culture work.
• Use a compound light microscope competently including oil immersion.
• Prepare a bacterial smear and heat-fix it correctly.
• Perform and interpret a Gram stain.
• Perform and interpret acid-fast, endospore, and capsule stains.
• Prepare and use culture media appropriately.
• Perform streak plate isolation and obtain isolated colonies.
• Describe and recognise colony morphology.
• Perform pure culture technique and maintain a pure culture.
• Apply methods of enumeration including plate counts and dilution series.
• Perform serial dilutions accurately and calculate the result.
• Perform biochemical tests used in bacterial identification.
• Use a dichotomous key or identification scheme to identify an unknown.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of physical and chemical control methods.
• Perform and interpret antimicrobial susceptibility testing.
• Describe the significance of normal flora sampled from the environment and body.
• Dispose of biohazardous material correctly.
• Keep an accurate laboratory record of procedures and results.
• Relate laboratory findings to clinical significance.

Optional Outcomes

• Relate course content to a current Florida public health problem.
• Describe antimicrobial resistance as a clinical and public health problem.
• Read and interpret a primary research paper or outbreak report.
• Describe how the material supports graduate or professional study.
• Seek undergraduate research or laboratory experience in the field.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Microbiological safety and biosafety levels
• Aseptic technique
• Microscopy and oil immersion
• Smear preparation and fixing
• Gram staining
• Acid-fast, endospore, and capsule stains
• Culture media preparation and use
• Streak plate isolation
• Colony morphology
• Pure culture technique
• Enumeration and plate counts
• Serial dilution and calculation
• Biochemical identification tests
• Identification of unknowns
• Physical and chemical control
• Antimicrobial susceptibility testing
• Environmental and body flora sampling
• Biohazardous waste disposal
• Laboratory record keeping
• Clinical significance of findings

Optional Topics

• Florida public health applications
• Antimicrobial resistance
• Primary literature and outbreak reports
• Graduate and professional preparation
• Undergraduate research and laboratory experience

Resources & Tools

• The laboratory manual the instructor issues — read the exercise before the session. Microbiology exercises have timing constraints and a student who reads the protocol at the bench will run out of session.
• A dedicated laboratory notebook — results arrive across days rather than within a session, and an unrecorded plate reading is a lost one.
• Closed-toe shoes, a laboratory coat, and hair tied back — requirements, not suggestions, and you will be turned away without them.
• OpenStax Microbiology and its laboratory appendices — free; useful background on why each technique works.
• ASM (American Society for Microbiology) teaching resources (asm.org) — free protocols, including the widely used laboratory safety guidelines for undergraduate teaching.
• Photographs of your own plates — free; colony and stain appearance is hard to revise from a textbook image and easy to revise from your own.
• CDC (cdc.gov) — free; disease pages, treatment guidance, and the MMWR, which is where outbreak investigations are actually published.
• Florida Department of Health (floridahealth.gov) — free; state and county reportable disease data, and the surveillance reports that make this material local.
• A UWF librarian — included in enrolment; an hour on database searching pays for itself across a whole degree.

Career Pathways

• Medical and clinical laboratory technologist (SOC 29-2011) and technician (SOC 29-2012) — ⚠ Florida licenses clinical laboratory personnel through the Department of Health, and licensure requires an approved programme, not merely coursework. Microbiology is one of the core disciplines of the field.
• Microbiologist (SOC 19-1022) — public health laboratories, environmental laboratories, water utilities, food safety, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology quality control.
• Epidemiologist (SOC 19-1041) — generally requires a graduate degree; the Florida Department of Health and county health departments are the principal state employers.
• Infection preventionist — hospital-based, commonly entered from nursing or medical laboratory science, with CBIC certification. Florida's large hospital systems — AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola — all employ them.
• Registered nurse (SOC 29-1141) — microbiology is a prerequisite for essentially every Florida nursing programme, which is why this prefix carries so much enrolment.
• Public health analyst and disease intervention specialist — county health departments across Florida; the state's climate, density, travel volume and mosquito burden make it a genuinely active infectious disease environment.
• Food safety and environmental health inspector — Florida's hospitality and agriculture sectors are large, and both are regulated on microbiological grounds.
• Water quality and environmental microbiology — utilities, springs and estuarine monitoring, and harmful algal bloom response, all substantial in this state.
• Preparation for medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, physician assistant and pharmacy — microbiology is prerequisite or strongly expected for all of them.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ UWF runs THREE separate microbiology routes — make sure you are in the right one

This is the single most important thing to understand about the MCB prefix, and no course title says it. UWF publishes three parallel microbiology sequences, in two different colleges and three different departments, aimed at three different audiences. They are not interchangeable, and enrolling in the wrong one wastes a term.

• ⚠⚠ Only the 3020 route is upper-division and only it opens the rest of the prefix. MCB4203 Microbes & Disease requires MCB3020 and accepts neither of the others. A biology major who takes the health sciences course has not met the requirement.
• ⚠ The prerequisites tell you the level far better than the titles do. MCB3020 requires general chemistry with its laboratory plus a full year of biology or anatomy and physiology; MCB2010 and MCB2010L publish no prerequisites at all. That gap is the real difference between the routes.
• If you are pre-nursing, check which one your programme names. UWF built MCB1000 for the BSN prerequisite explicitly, but nursing programmes at other Florida institutions frequently name MCB2010C instead, and requirements change between catalog years. Ask your advisor and get the answer against your own catalog year.
• ⚠⚠ Transferring in or out, this is where credit goes wrong. All three carry the word "Microbiology," and a transfer evaluator reading titles rather than descriptions can accept a course that does not satisfy the requirement. Carry a syllabus.
• Most Florida institutions run only one or two of these routes, commonly the integrated MCB2010C. UWF running all three is unusual and is what makes the choice a real one here.

⚠⚠⚠ UWF built this course for the BSN prerequisite — and that is exactly why you must check your own programme

• UWF states the course is "specifically designed to meet the microbiology pre-requisite requirement for the 4 year BSN degree." That is an unusually direct statement of purpose for a catalog entry, and it should be taken at face value for UWF's own nursing programme.
• ⚠⚠ It is not a guarantee for anyone else's. Nursing programmes across Florida name their microbiology prerequisite differently — many name the integrated MCB2010C, some name MCB2010 plus MCB2010L, and some accept several. The number your programme names is the one that counts.
• ⚠ Catalog-year matters as much as institution. Prerequisite lists are revised, and you are generally held to the catalog year you entered under. Get the answer in writing against your own catalog year, not from a current web page or from another student.
• Most nursing programmes require the laboratory as well as the lecture, and many require a minimum grade — commonly a C or better — and a recency limit, frequently five to seven years. A passing grade is not automatically a qualifying grade, and an old one may not count at all.
• Nursing admission in Florida is competitive and prerequisite grades are the ranking mechanism. Treat this course as part of your application, not as a box to clear.
• ⚠ If you may transfer, decide early. Taking the course that your destination programme names is far easier than arguing equivalency afterwards.

⚠⚠ The asterisk in a UWF prerequisite means the course may be taken at the same term

• UWF marks a concurrent course with an asterisk, defined on the catalog's Course Information page as: "This course may be taken prior to or during the same term."
• ⚠ A prerequisite written WITHOUT an asterisk must be completed first; one written WITH an asterisk may be taken in the same term. Reading an asterisked prerequisite as sequential adds a term for no reason.
• UWF also uses an explicit Co-requisite: field, the stricter form — conventionally the same term rather than prior-or-same. Both notations appear in this prefix, and in one case on opposite halves of the same pair.
• The /L notation in a prerequisite — CHM 2046/L, BSC 2011/L — means the course together with its laboratory.
• Confirm with an advisor; the registration system, not the catalog text, is what enforces it.

⚠ A material and supply fee is assessed

• UWF publishes that a Material and Supply Fee will be assessed for this course. It is charged in addition to tuition.
• ⚠ The catalog does not publish the amount. The department or the Cashier's Office is the only reliable source — ask before the term rather than discovering it on a bill.
• The reason is real: media, stains, disposable loops, agar plates and autoclave capacity are consumed per student per session, and microbiology is among the more consumable-intensive teaching laboratories.
• ⚠ Not every laboratory in this prefix carries a published fee. Do not generalise from one course to another — check each entry.

⚠⚠⚠ Microbiology laboratory safety is not the same as general laboratory safety

• You will be culturing live microorganisms. Most teaching organisms are Biosafety Level 1 or 2 and are chosen to be low risk, but they are alive and they multiply — which is exactly what makes the discipline different from a chemistry laboratory.
• ⚠⚠ Aseptic technique protects you and protects the experiment. Contamination is the commonest cause of a failed result in this course, and the same habits that keep a culture pure keep an organism off your hands.
• No food, no drink, no cosmetics, no phone on the bench. Hand hygiene on entering and on leaving, every session, without exception.
• ⚠ Everything that touched a culture is biohazardous waste and goes to autoclave, not to a bin. Learn the disposal stream in week one.
• Report every spill, every broken tube, and every needle or glass injury immediately — including small ones, and including ones you think you handled. Institutions have a procedure for this and it exists to protect you.
• ⚠⚠ Tell the instructor privately, before the term starts, if you are pregnant, immunocompromised, on immunosuppressive therapy, or living with someone who is. This is not a bar to taking the course; it is information that changes which organisms you should handle, and the department can only accommodate what it knows about.
• Ask about vaccination status, particularly hepatitis B, if the course handles clinical material. Health-programme laboratories commonly require it.
• The CDC's Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL) is the underlying authority and is free. The instructor's rules govern in the room.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Scheduled laboratory sessions with pre-laboratory preparation and written work. ⚠ Microbiology laboratories frequently require returning between sessions to read plates, because cultures grow on their own schedule rather than the timetable's. Ask about this in week one.
• ⚠ No "permission is required" marking appears anywhere in the MCB prefix — enrolment is gated by prerequisites rather than by cohort admission. That is not true of the clinical programmes these courses feed into, which admit by cohort.
• UWF publishes no contact hours, lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. Confirm the offering pattern with the department — and note that a course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement, which matters in this prefix more than most — MCB1000, MCB2010 and MCB3020 all teach microbiology, and only MCB3020 is upper division. SCNS equivalency runs on the number and the content, so a course transfers as what it is, not as what its title resembles.

MCB1000L is 1 semester hour at the University of West Florida, through the Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, College of Health.