Writing in Biology

After collecting the pictures of the web and its location, I was required to find a picture of a map that would show my reader where my spider web was found on campus. My first instinct was to use the map on the “My UMass” App. This App has a feature to navigate campus via a map system. By searching for the building I found the spider in, Morrill II, I was able to screenshot it’s exact location. I kept both the Morrill II and the Morrill III buildings in the map to show that the hallway the spider was found in was connected both buildings. As a result of collecting all of the pictures needed to create my multi-panel figure, I downloaded the program Inkscape. This program required that I also downloaded the program XQuartz. I uploaded all of my pictures onto the Inkscape canvas and began to experiment with some possible orientations. I decided that having my location pictures on the left side and the spider web pictures on the right side would be the most asthetically pleasing. First, I selected the hallway and map picture and set them both to equal width measuements of 106.6 mm. This was to create a straight midline within the figure. The hallway picture was placed on top of the map picture on the left side. The heights of the two pictures were slightly different because I wanted the map picture to be emphasized, therefore setting the height to be around 10 mm taller. The midline was offset to the right by about 3 mm in order to emphasize the location pictures. I stacked the three spider web pictures on top of each other on the right side, aligning all of their widths to be around 103.7 mm. The heights of the three pictures varied in increasing order down the figure. I belived this format was the most logical and easy to comprehend.

Action potentials first begin when a graded potential is strong enough to reach its trigger zone. This causes voltage-gated sodium channels to open, resulting in increased sodium permeability. This overall process causes the membrane potential to become more positive (normally it is at -70, resting membrane potential). This happens until the charge of the cell reaches the threshold (-50 mv). At around +30 mv, the voltage-gated channels for potassium open. This causes increased potassium permeability. The cell begins to become more negative again due to this. Eventually, resting membrane potential is restored. 

Additionally, flooding as a result of hurricanes has become worse in recent years due to climate change. Sea levels have been rising and Houston sits barely above sea level to begin with, so now there is more water creating larger stormsurge potential than there was 100 years ago (Associated Press). The air and water are also warmer, and warmer water leads to increased evaporation occurring. Increased evaporation leads to a rise in air humidity; the amount of water that sits in the atmosphere. When there is more water in the atmosphere, there is more potential water to be collected by hurricanes and then come down as rain when the hurricane makes landfall. This was a key factor in the massive amounts of flooding that occured in Houston after Hurricane Harvey (Associated Press).

Kin selection is an evolutionary strategy that looks to favor the reproductive success of the genes at play, meaning that this can result in favoring the reproductive success of an organism's kin over their own success, whether that be their reproductive success or even their survival. This can explain the behaviors of social insects and other altruistic behaviors exhibited by kin. This idea is represented by the famous saying that " I would die for two brothers or eight cousins". More specifcally than that though, this phenomenon was explained mathematically with Hamilton's Rule, which stated that kin selection causes for gene frequency to increase when the genetc relatedness of a recipient to the actor is multiplied by benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor. This was summarized in the equation rB>C. r is the genetic relatedness, B is the benefit to the recipient of the act and C is the reproductive cost to the actor. Put simply, this means that the actor will only act altruistically if the reproductive benefit for the genes is greater than the reproductive value from not acting, which would be the cost to the actor. The benfit for the genes increases as the relatedness increases because of the simillarity in the genetic code they share.

I placed the map underneath the two other photos with the coordinates x: 0.00 and y: 39.031. The width of the map is 190.613 and the height is 128.058. You can see/enter coordinates underneath the Extensions and Zoom commands. To complete the multi-panel figure, I made boxes to label each figure. To make a box, I clicked the “create rectangles and squares” button located on the left side underneath the ruler icon. I adjusted the height and width of the box to 18.517 x 18.517. I clicked on the Fill and Stroke icon located to the left of the Text icon. I selected the white fill and the solid, black line for the dashees and the width for the line is 2.642 mm. I then created two copies of it by selecting copy once and selecting paste twice. I put one of the boxes at coordinates x: 76.37 and y: 278.50 and put a bold, size 36 Times New Roman “A.” in that box. I put the second box at x: 171.08 and y: 278.55 and put a “B.” in the box. I repeated that with a “C.” and I put the box at x: 172.141 and y: 149.074. the A., B., and C. all are bold and 36 Times New Roman font. I then clicked the star and polygon button and put a small, black star at x: 90.58 and y: 131.85 with a height and width of 6.4 mm. The star should be in the corner of Morrill IV. I saved the multi-panel figure and exported it as a png image.

Protein structure and folding plays a large role in protein function. There are four levels of protein structure: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quarternary. All proteins have primary structure, which is the sequence of amino acids. The amino acids of a protein are kept together with covalent, peptide bonds. After primary structure comes the secondary structure, which are structures amino acid sequences organize into. Secondary structure involves alpha helices and beta sheets. The alpha helix is similar to the structure of DNA while beta sheets that look like flat sheets. The bonds that are prominent in secondary structure are hydrogen bonds between the backbone atoms of the protein. The overall folding of a single polypeptide chain is call its tertiary structure. If there are more than one polypeptide chains coming together to function, it is referred to as quarternary structure. Not all proteins have quarternary structure, but all proteins have up to tertiary structure. Hydrogen bondng, Van der waals interactions, disulfide bonding, and ionic bonding occurs tertiarty and quarternary bonding. Understanding the levels of protein folding allows us to understand how these proteins function and interact with one another. 

The red circle was placed directly over the location of the web. Following the placement of the circle over the web location on the image of the relative location, I began working on detailing the scale. The line tool was utilized to draw a straight red line across the middle of the quarter from the web image. The line was 0.900 in width and placed directly above the quarter with a small gap between itself and the quarter. Above the line, I used the text tool to write out the width of the quarter in millimeters (24.25 mm). The font was chosen to be red like the line it sat above, and the font size was 18. These steps led to the completion of the first two components of the figure.

Finally, I started to add the details to the map location. The words “Student Union” were written in red with the text tool and superimposed onto the corresponding building at the center of the map. I designated the font size to be 30. I then created a small red dot (W=2.268 x H =2.268) on the map at the location where the web was found. The dot was filled with the same color red. A black line was then created that extended from the newly placed dot at an approximately 45 degree angle. The line was black and had a width of 0.265. It stretched beyond the student map depiction of the student union and continued a little farther. At its terminal end, opposite the dot, it connected to another box created using the rectangle tool (W=39.997 x H=13.539). The box had a black outline with a width of 0.819 and a white fill. Inside the box the word “Location” was written in black with size 24 font. With this step done, the figure was complete and it was exported at a PNG image file.

Before starting my hunt for a spiderweb, I had brainstormed some locations that spiders may be present on campus. My first thought was to look in the older academic buildings on campus, such as Bartlett, Herter, or any of the Morrill Science Buildings. It was easiest for me to check the Morrill Science Buildings first due to the fact that I have  many classes in that area of campus. I have many classes in Morrill II, so I had investigated there first. As I was looking for a spider web in Morrill II, I knew to look for areas that were undisturbed. This was because undisturbed areas, such as corners and closets, would give a spider the opportunity to build a web without any confrontation. I slowly walked through each hallway on every floor, looking in corners and stairwells. Finally on the third floor in the hallway connecting the Morrill II building and the Morrill III building, I came across a encaved rectangle in the wall. There was nothing placed in this groove in the wall and had looked untouched for a decent amount of time. I approached the bottom left corner of the groove and found a small spider sitting in the middle of a faint web. I took several pictures of the spider and its web with the flash on. Some pictures were facing down toward the web and a couple others were taken against the left wall in order to view the definition of the web. The flash seemed to scare the spider further back into the corner so I tried not to take more pictures than I needed. In addition, I took a picture of the hallway the indentation the in the wall was located in order to orient my reader as to where I found the spiderweb.

While getting the location on a detailed map, I searched the internet for OpenStreetMap. Once on the website, I entered the address for the Student Union building which is 41 Campus Center Way Amherst, MA. After the address was entered, the map was focused so that the Student Union was in the center of my screen and then I screenshotted the image. Afterwards, I emailed the picture to myself in order to be able to access the picture on any computer, especially those located in the BCRC. Once the image was loaded onto the computer in front of me, I cropped the picture so that all that was shown now was the Campus Pond, the Union, the Campus Center, a portion of the library, and about three quarters of the parking garage. Now, the Student Union is the primary point of focus on the map.

    Now that all three images were saved into my email and I could essentially access them anywhere, I proceeded to the BCRC and opened the images on one of the computers provided in the lab. For organizational purposes, the three images were placed into a folder which I created. The program used to assemble the figure was Inkscape. After the program was launched, each image was imported from their folder and embedded into the document. The first image I resized was the picture of the web. This image was made to be 138 pixels wide by 173 pixels tall. The image of the map has the same dimensions as the picture of the web and the two were placed next to each other in the figure. Since the image of the environment was taken horizontally, I decided to make this image 276 pixels wide by 173 pixels tall. This way, it fits uniformly beneath the picture of the web and map. Once it was all assembled, the web is in the top left corner, the map is in the top right, and the environment in beneath them forming a rectangle that is 276 pixels wide by 346 pixels tall.

    Now that the figure is ordered the way that I wanted, I began to label the figures. To start  I made a perfect circle that had a white fill and a black border with a stroke of 1.5. The circle itself is 27 pixels wide, large enough so that a lowercase “a” sized 64 can be fit and centered into the middle of the circle. The circle and “a” were grouped together and triplicated so that labels “b” and “c” could be made. Both letters were also font size 64 and they were also centered in their respective circles. The labels were put into the top left corner of their respective picture; the web was labeled “a,” the picture of the environment was labeled “b,” and the map was labeled “c.” The labels and the images were then grouped together so that they all moved as a cohesive unit and could not be separated. In order to complete the figure I added a filled red circle, measuring 13 pixels wide, to the map at the location of which the web was photographed. Afterwards, a rectangular box was placed around the portion of ductwork that the spider web is located. The box is roughly 35 pixels tall by 40 pixels wide, no fill, and a red border of stroke width 2.0. The box is oriented roughly an inch from the bottom of the image and an inch and a half from the right border. With these additions, I deemed the figure to be complete and exported it as a png file so that I could email it to myself once again and upload later on in the project.

While looking for a spider web to photograph, I found myself in front of the main entrance to the Student Union building. Once there, I noticed that there was a stone pathway abutting the left side of the Union, but before the grassy patch near the Campus Center. This path connects to the tunnel system that joins the Campus Center and the Student Union buildings. While walking down the stairs, I saw metallic ductwork on the right side of the path coming from the Union. Underneath the first set of ductwork, closest to the stairs, I noticed a partial spider web running from the brick wall to the bottom right side of the duct. In order to capture the picture of the web, I stood on the second step from bottom of the stairs and aimed my phone’s camera at the back right corner of the duct where it meets the brick. The camera was held vertically, roughly five inches from the web at a 45 degree angle to get the best view of the web. In order to incorporate my scale, I held my UCard horizontally between my thumb and forefinger, almost pinching it at the bottom for stability. Once I took a satisfactory picture of the web, I climbed to the top of the stairs and turned around to face the pathway once more. At the top of the stairs, I held my camera horizontally at eye level so that the entire environment was visible and snapped the picture.