An Invisible World (Microbiology)

Recall cards on the foundations of microbiology. What our ancestors knew: microbes and fermentation, ancient fermented foods, early ideas of contagion and immunity from Varro and Thucydides, Leeuwenhoek's animalcules, and the Golden Age of Microbiology with Pasteur and Koch. A systematic approach: taxonomy and classification, Linnaeus and Systema Naturae, the Linnaean hierarchy, binomial nomenclature, the kingdom systems of Haeckel and Whittaker, phylogenetic trees, Woese and Fox's rRNA three-domain system, horizontal gene transfer, and Bergey's Manuals. Types of microorganisms: the size scale from the unaided eye to viruses, the metric units of length, and the defining features of bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, helminths, and viruses, along with the subfields that study them.