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This course extends your basic knowledge in Immunology going into more depth and giving you the fundamental knowledge you need to understand how the immune system functions in health and disease and how immunological therapies can be devised. The evolution of the immune system has been shaped by its need to protect the host from infection and the majority of multicellular organisms have some form of organised immune system that increases in complexity in line with the organism. The course considers the cells and organs of the immune system, their differentiation and how they function to provide innate and adaptive immunity. Antigen presentation; antibody structure and function; generation of diversity; complement; T cell subsets; cell trafficking; cytokines and signalling are covered in detail. Evolution and comparative immunology are discussed later in the course. Although the immune system functions to protect from infection and maintain the health of the individual, immune dysfunction may cause disease and the final part of the course focuses on loss of tolerance and autoimmunity. Practical classes reinforce this knowledge as well as teaching immunological and generic laboratory techniques, and range of transferable skills.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr Isabel Crane (ext. 53783) i.j.crane@abdn.ac.uk
The course consists of 3 lectures per week and 1 practical session per week. It is examined by continuous assessment of submitted practical assignments and a 3 hour examination with essay-type questions
The aims of this course are several fold, and are divided into specialist knowledge (the course content) and transferable skills. In summary they are:
1. To develop and extend your knowledge of cellular and molecular components of the immune system.
2. To enable you to understand how the components of the immune system interact to maintain the health of the individual and how immune dysfunction may lead to disease.
3. To give you the opportunity to gain laboratory skills by using methods to recognise, isolate and culture leucocytes and study their functions and to use antibodies for quantification in laboratory practical classes.
4. To allow you to develop and practise a range of transferable skills during the practicals, including teamwork, software applications and data analysis.
These are available on WebCT. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/webct/login/
Practical work is an important part of this course and much of your time will be spent in the laboratory. The course contains ten practical elements, 8 of which have a marked assignment. Each marked assignment is given equal weight.
Details of each practical are given at the end of this booklet. Please read them before you come to the practical. On the day the co-ordinator will give you additional information on the assignment that is to be handed in so listen carefully and ask if you are not sure.
All assignments (except for practical 4) must be handed in by 4.30 pm on the Wednesday following the practical on Thursday. Practical 4 assignment can be handed in on the Wednesday of week 35. Practical assignments must be handed in to staff in room 2.62.3 IMS (except for practical 9 – email see instructions practical handbook). They will also be available for collection from here. We will endeavour to return reports within 1 week of the practicals.
Late submissions without a justifiable reason (i.e. illness confirmed by a medical certificate) may be subject to a deduction of up to 25% of the mark for each day, or part of a day that the work is late (if the work is accepted for marking). If you miss a practical class and do not submit an acceptable absence form (see section ‘Absence from Classes on Medical Grounds’) you will be given a zero mark for that assignment. Please inform the course co-ordinator immediately if you have any problems in this respect.
You will need to bring a lab coat.
The general recommended textbook (Abbas and Lichtman), listed below, provides a lot of information relevant to this course and many of the lectures will use the material in this book. Where appropriate, and particularly for practicals and the evolution and comparative immunology part of the course, you will also be directed to specific reading material.
Cellular and Molecular Immunology by A.K. Abbas and A.H. Lichtman (Sixth Edition) W.B. Saunders Co. (ISBN: 978-1-4160-3122-2).
Immunobiology 6th Edition Janeway, Travers, Walport and Schlomchik, you may also find useful and is in the library or new Janeway's Immunobiology by Ken Murphy, Paul Travers, and Mark Walport 7th Edition.
The University has strict regulations on plagiarism. If you are unsure about what constitutes plagiarism read the University guide on plagiarism at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/writing
Copying or plagiarising another person’s work, either from other students or published material in books or papers and submitted as your own for assessment is considered a form of cheating. This is considered by the University to be a serious offence and will be penalised according to the extent involved and whether it is decided there was an attempt at deliberate deception, or whether bad practice was involved. If you do use information or ideas obtained from textbooks or other published material you must give a precise reference to the source both at the appropriate point in your narrative and in a list of references at the end of your work. Direct quotations from published material should be indicated by quotation marks and referenced in the text as above.
There will be a 40% continuous assessment component to this module based upon the 8 assignments as above.
There will be a written 3 hour examination at the end of the course (60%). It will consist of a choice of four questions selected from a total of eight.
IM3501 is a 30 credit course and to achieve these credits you should put in 300 hours of study including attending lectures, tutorials, practical classes, completing assignments, reading and revising. Students are expected to attend all lectures, laboratory classes, and tutorials, and to complete all class exercises by stated deadlines.
The degree examination is held in May/June, with the re-sit examination in August. If you fail the practical continuous assessment component of the course you may be required to sit an additional practical/oral examination.
If you are very close to the borderlines of Pass/Fail or possibly the Honours entry standard you may be required to attend an oral examination. If so, you will be notified by e-mail 7-14 working days after the written examination and the oral examinations will be held shortly thereafter. Please make sure you are still available for an oral examination in Aberdeen over this period and check your email regularly. If you do not attend the oral examination your original mark will stand. Each oral exam will last for 15-20 minutes and will normally be conducted by the course supervisor and another member of staff who has taught on the course. Any aspect of the course may be discussed. The student will be notified of the outcome of this oral examination the following day.
Dr Isobel Crane, Course Co-ordinator Dr Heather Wilson, Deputy Course Co-ordinator Dr Steven Bird Dr Allison Carrington Dr Thelma Fletcher Dr Barry Lewis Prof Janet Liversidge Dr Shahida Shahana Dr Keith Stewart Dr Frank Ward Dr Simon Wong Dr Neil Young Course Administration, Lyndsay McEwan
If students have difficulties with any part of the course that they cannot cope with alone they should notify someone immediately. If the problem relates to the subject matter you may be best advised to contact the member of staff who is teaching that part of the course. Students with registered disabilities should contact either the IMS based Departmental Office (Miss L McEwan l.mcewan@abdn.ac.uk) or the Old Aberdeen office associated with the teaching laboratories (Mrs S.Jones s.jones@abdn.ac.uk ) to ensure that the appropriate facilities have been made available. Otherwise, you are strongly encouraged to contact any of the following as you see appropriate:
Course Co-ordinator (IC).
Course student representatives.
Convenor of the SMS Student-Staff Liaison Committee (Dr G.T.A. McEwan, 55701, g.t.a.mcewan@abdn.ac.uk).
Adviser of Studies.
School Disabilities Co-ordinator (Dr Derryck Shewan, 55785, d.shewan@abdn.ac.uk)
Staff are based at Zoology and Foresterhill (IMS and Polwarth) and we strongly encourage that you use email or telephone the SMS office as a means of establishing contact. You may be wasting your time to travel to Foresterhill only to find staff unavailable.
The students within each course, year, or programme elect representatives by the end of the fourth week of teaching within each half-session. In this school we operate a system of course representatives. Any student registered within a course or programme who wishes to represent a given group of students can stand for election as a class representative. You will be informed when the elections for class representative will take place.
What will it involve?
It will involve speaking to your fellow students about the course you represent. This can include any comments that they may have. You will attend a Staff Student Liaison Committee and you should represent the views and concerns of the students within this meeting. As a representative you will also be able to contribute to the agenda. You then feedback to the students after this meeting with any actions that are being taken.
Training
Training for class representatives will be run by the Students Association in conjunction with SPARQS (Student Participation in Quality Scotland). Training will take place in the fourth or fifth week of teaching each semester. For more information about the Class representative system visit www.ausa.org.uk or email the VP Education & Employability vped@abdn.ac.uk. For further information on class representation and student involvement in Quality visit www.sparqs.org.uk
The University operates a system for monitoring students' progress to identify students who may be experiencing difficulties in a particular course and who may be at risk of jeopardising their class certificate (see later). If the Course Co-ordinator has concerns about your attendance and/or performance, the Registry will be informed. The Registry will then write to you (by e-mail in term-time) to ask you to contact their office in the first instance. Depending on your reason for absence the Registry will either deal directly with your case or will refer you to your Adviser of Studies or a relevant support service. This system is operated to provide support for students who may be experiencing difficulties with their studies. Students are required to attend such meetings with their Adviser of Studies in accordance with General Regulation 8.
Set criteria are used to determine when a student should be reported in the monitoring system. You will be asked to meet your Adviser if any of the following criteria apply for this course:-
either (i) if you are absent for a continuous period of two weeks or 25% of the course (whichever is less) without good cause being reported;
or (ii) if you are absent from two small group teaching sessions e.g. (laboratory/tutorial classes) without good cause;
or (iii) if you fail to submit a piece of summative or a substantial piece of formative in-course assessment by the stated deadline
If you fail to respond within the prescribed timescale (as set out in the e-mail or letter) you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course concerned and will accordingly be ineligible to take the end of course assessment or to enter for the resit. The Registry will write to you (by e-mail in term-time) to inform you of this decision. If you wish consideration to be given to reinstating you in the course you will be required to meet the Convener of the Students' Progress Committee.
Students who attend and complete the work required for a course are considered to have been awarded a ‘Class Certificate’. Being in possession of a valid Class Certificate for a course entitles a student to sit degree examinations for that course. From 2010/11 class certificates will be valid for two years and permit a total of three attempts at the required assessment within that two year period i.e. the first attempt plus up to two resits.
You will receive a University e-mail account when you register with the University Computing Centre. The University will normally use e-mail to communicate with you during term-time.
It is your responsibility to check your e-mail on a regular (at least weekly) basis and to tidy the contents of your e-mail inbox to ensure that it does not go over quota (see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/diss/email/mailquota.hti for guidance on managing your e-mail quota). It is recommended that you use your University e-mail account to read and respond to University communications. If you already have a non-University e-mail account that you use for personal correspondence, it is possible to set up automatic forwarding of messages from your University e-mail account to your personal e-mail address (see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/local/mail.forward/) but, should you do so, it is your responsibility to ensure that this is done correctly. The University takes no responsibility for delivery of e-mails to non-University accounts.
You should note that failure to check your e-mail or failure to receive e-mail due to being over quota or due to non-delivery of an e-mail forwarded to a non-University e-mail account would not be accepted as a ground for appeal (for further information on appeals procedures, please refer to http://www.abdn.ac.uk/registry/quality/appendix5x17.hti).
Guide to Citing and Referencing
This guide should be used to assist you when completing any work for disciplines in the School of Medical Sciences. All work should include citations at appropriate places in the text, with a complete reference list at the end of the assignment. If diagrams/ graphs/ tables are copied or adapted from other publications/ websites, the sources must also be cited in the legend for that item, and included in your reference list.
Good citing and referencing not only improves the quality of your work, but it gives credit to the authors of original work, and makes it less likely that you can be accused of plagiarism. Further guidance on writing and plagiarism may be found at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/writing/. When you submit work for marking, you are declaring that YOU are the author, that you have not copied it or plagiarised any material from other sources, AND that all sources of information have been acknowledged in your text. Students may be penalised by the University if found guilty of plagiarism.
Students are warned to be careful if using websites as sources of information. These may be inaccurate and are often not peer-reviewed. You are strongly encouraged to use advanced textbooks, peer-reviewed papers or reviews as the sources of your information in your work. Students are also advised to avoid quoting chunks of text in their work. Just because you put quotation marks around some text does not mean that you have not plagiarised it. Try and explain ideas and concepts in your own words.
The referencing style used here is Harvard, similar to that recommended by the University Library (see their factsheet for further information on referencing). Students must use this style of citing and referencing for all work. Other styles are not acceptable. Marks may be deducted if students do not cite or reference properly (see specific marking schemes for details).
Citing references within the text
You must provide citations in the text at the appropriate places by putting the author’s surname and year of publication in round brackets immediately after the relevant text (author, date method).
Author, date method
Jones et al. (1999) has argued that….
Studies have produced conflicting results…..(Bloggs, 2000; MacDuff et al., 1993)
Smith stated (1990)…..and then later work confirmed this (2003)…..
Bloggs (2001) investigated…..
One author (Bloggs, 2000)
Two authors (Smith & Jones, 1982)
Three or more authors (Chesterfield et al., 1995)
If the same author(s) wrote two or more papers in the same year Thwaites et al. stated (1990a)…..and then provided further evidence (1990b)…..
N.B. “et al.” should be in italics, as should all other Latin words/phrases in your text (e.g. in vitro). There is also a full stop after “et al.”, since it is an abbreviation of “et alia” (“and others”).
Listing your references at the end of your work
Your list of references must place the surnames of the first authors in alphabetical order. List all authors of a piece of work unless there are a large number.
Format of references at the end of your work
Book - whole Rang, H.P., Dale, M.M., Ritter, J.M. & Flower, R.J. (2007) Pharmacology. 6th Ed. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.
Book – article or chapter within Johnson, D. & Smart, J.S. (1983) Advanced techniques in measuring athletic performance. In: S. Roberts, ed., Sports Science in the Laboratory. London: Macmillan, pp. 3-28.
Journal – article within Furchgott, R.F., Zawadzki, J.V. (1980) The obligatory role of endothelial cells in the relaxation of arterial smooth muscle by acetylcholine. Nature. 288(5789), 373-6.
Website Department for Education and Employment (2000). Student loans: guidance on terms and conditions from April 2000. [online]. Available from: http://www.dfee.gov.uk/loan2000/index.html [Accessed 23rd March 2006]
