Biophysics 1 and 2

May 2014

Summary: Generally it is good enough. But Compared to Biology and Chemistry, the subject does not reach their level. As a good feature, their labs are good and even better than Biology and Chemistry. The book was also unexpectedly good.

Feature: The book was good. It was written by Hungarians and seems to be used in Hungary only. I had doubted its quality, to be honest. But the book was actually good. Especially thermodynamics part was good; understanding thermodynamics laws from using relationship between intensive property and extensive property was extraordinary. I felt it was the first time to understand the laws.

Lab: Labs were also good. Doing wide variety of practicals is nice to understand vaious physical theories.

What I still remember is MCV(Mean corpuscular volume) calculations in Centrifugation. The hematocrit, also known as packed cell volume (PCV) or erythrocyte volume fraction (EVF), is the volume percentage (%) of red blood cells in blood. It is normally about 45% for men and 40% for women. For example, if the hematocrit equals 42.5% and RBC = 4.58 million per microliter (4,580,000/L), then the following equation would obtain. MCV = Hrt/RBC. MCV = 0.425/([4.58 * 106]/10?6 L) = 92.8x10^(-15) L = 92.8 fL.

Then we add some salt solutions; hypotonic and hypertonic for each blood. Red Blood cell shrink in hypertonic solution and swell in hypotonic respectively. Then centrifuge both. Hematocrit values differ from the normal one, because of shrinkage or swelling of RBCs respectively. MCV values change accordingly; MCV increases for swollen one and MCV decrease for shrinked one. That is visualization of osmosis with RBCs.

We did hypotonic and hypertonic treatment of RBCs in Biology too. But neither swelling nor shrinkage could not be observed.



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