ashorey's blog

In order to conclusively identify the organelle tagged with the mCherry fluorophore, we used immunofluorescence to visualize the hypothesized organelle. The mCherry tag was hypothesized to be on the nuclear lamina, so we stained the nuclear lamina with a GFP antibody. This allowed us to perform microscopy on fixed cells and see the colocalization of the mCherry tag and GFP stain. Because the antibody used was a known nuclear lamina antibody, its colocalization with the mCherry tagged molecules proves that the tag is on the same molecule as the antibody. Therefore the mCherry tag is in fact on the nuclear lamina. 

Medicine is not a perfect science. Nothing is a perfect science ever. Humans are naturally very prone to mistakes, errors, miscalculations, and bad assumptions. When a human does something, the best it can be is perfectly human, but never perfect. When that principle applies to medicine though, the concequences become extreme. Atul Gwande's book "The Checklist Manifesto" writes about the inability of people in any profession to ever achieve everything they know how to do. This sounds backwards, "If you know how to do it, just do it and you'll achieve it", but it is not that easy. Considering the more complex a task required, the greater opportunity for failure in completing it successfully and the more harsh the failure becomes. This is esspecially true in the medical field when tens of people: doctors, nurses, aenestaticians, critical care personel, etc., have to all perform their tasks in harmony to treat horrible patients with a one in a million chances of survival. If anything anywhere along the line goes wrong, and it will, the room for improvision has to be there, but small enough for the treatment to have a true and certain path from A, diagnosis, to B, cure. 

While considered one of the most nutrient abundant foods, fish is known to be very high in harful heavy metals, which are thought to cause adverse affects. The American Heart Association has plugged fish as a vital part of a healthy diet to support healthy arteries, veins, and hearts for decades. Even still, fish is only eaten weekly by one third of Americans. Let's examine why that might be. Firstly, its true that fish simply does not appeal to everyone. Some ambiguity in the process of cooking and preparing the fish may be off putting some who find it unmanagable. Then there are those who avoid it for the advertised risks the pollutants may house. Are these worries founded, or do the benefits outweight the risks? Benefits from fish include the maintenance of a healthy heart beat, decreasing blod pressure, reducing inflammation, and keeping healthy blood vessels. It remains true that contaminants make their way into our fish through run-off water and the magnification from smaller organisms accumulating metal and being in turn eaten by the preditorial fish we eat. Pollutants in fish include PCBs, pesticide residues, and mercury. Mercury can destroy nerves in adults and cause brain damage in fetuses and children, when at levels much higher than that found in fish. The best method is to avoid the fish known to have the highest amount of mercury accumulation, and dig in to the others!

“Fish: Friend or Foe?” The Nutrition Source, Harvard School of Public Health, 22 May 2019, www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/.

Slime molds are unicellular protist organisms that were previously classified as fungi until they were discovered to be unrelated. Slime molds are lacking the general characteristics of fungi such as having chitin in their walls and not being able to move in any form of their life cycle. The specific slime mold species that will be experimented, Physarum Polycephalum, is able to live in the haploid and diploid form. In starvation, the diploid will sporulate and the haploid spores then sexually reproduce to increase genetic variation in the species as if favored by natural selection. The diploid form is able to grow plasmodium which is the characteristic appearance of slime molds, forming large branching structures that expand across a surface. 

    Research has been performed on this species and scientists have made conclusions about its intelligence, organization and memory. It has been shown to exhibit a collective behavior where several single celled organisms cluster and form temporary tissues that move together in times of resource deprivation. Also slime molds have been found to grow in any direction to find food, then upon discovery of a food source, reduces the non beneficial branches that did not land on a food source and thickens the successful branch. 

Nuclear lamin are a type five intermediate filament in all animal cells that little is known about. It is not common knowledge to know what nuclear lamin are or what they do. However, nuclear lamina mutations are responsible for a high number of common diseases in the human population. Nuclear lamina come in two main types, A and B. Both types of filaments have subtypes, and all animals express at least one subtype of B lamins. A common disease occurs when a type A prelamin, that is a type A lamin that is modified to produce other subtypes of A lamin, has a mutation to not allow it to bind properly to membranes and DNA. It congregates in the nuclear envelop and causes progenic syndromes and muscular dystrophies. These affect many people across the globe and nuclear lamina is clearly very involved in multi-cellular organisms. They are very structurally important for working muscles and an effective nervous system. 

In dogs, coat colors are controlled by many variations in gene expressions and alleles. In a simplified analysis of these changes, three main genes produce obvious and predictable traits in dog phenotypes for coat colors and patterns. The TYPR1, MC1R, MSH, and ASIP genes all have complex involvment in the pathways to produce color and pattern of color in dogs. The MC1R allele codes for a receptor protein on the membrane of melanocyte cells, which are cells that are responsible for the expression of the color genes in dogs, and therefore control the color pigments produced in the hair follicles. When this allele is precent in the genome in the wildtype, the receptor protein interacts with all the molecules it is meant to and successfully passes the message from the extracellular matrix. Once received the signal causes the transcription of the TYPR1 gene which produces the pigments required to make black colors. If TYPR1 is the only mutated gene and is homozygous recessive (AARRbb) then the color will be brown. ASIP genes code for a molecule that also get received by the MCIR receptor. If ASIP is the only signaling molecule present, the pigment becomes red by a different mechanism. MSH is the other molecule (in the simplified model) that is recepted by MC1R, and if this molecule is present it is dominant in reception to ASIP, and the transcription for black/brown color does occur. If MC1R is mutated (rr) then there is no transcription of the pigment genes and the hair will lack color and appear yellow or white. However, MC1R is only vital for HAIR pigmentation, therefore other parts of the dog will be colored black if the B gene is present even if the R gene is not present, giving the possibility for a yellow dog with black nose. A brown dog cannot have a black nose because the hair color determined that the black gene was already missing in the dog, and the receptor is wildtype. 

Our modern era of the anthropocene has had a hand in many of the ecological changes in the biosphere of the earth. Many of those changes are notably damaging to the environment based on the standards for pollution, genetic and species diversity, and gloabal climate change. People are very people-centric in the concerns about and research of these impactful and virulent changes. Often, the first things we notice are the ones that affect us the most, which is sensible considering that to notice changes that don't affect us, we have to be actively searching for the affects in the environment, which we might not do unless we have already seen that changes are occurring. This however is a very irresponsible way to gage humanity's impacts on the world. We have the specialization and resources to actively seak the effects of environmental degredation and climate change, and when we use them, the severity of the changes are revealed. Specifically when it comes to extinction rates and species diversity, the changes are astronomical. We have seen two major mass extinctions in the world so far, and now we are entering into a third. 

When plants form leafy branches, the branch grows from the base of an axillary bud. This bud contains an axillary meristem that drives cellular division at the base of the branch as grows it outwards. This is an iterative process that repeats hundreds of times and allows plants to have multiple sets of the same organs: leaves, branches, etc. Because every branch happens near the axillary bud on the stem of the plant, the locations that branches grow from are highly predictable. In roots however, branching occurs very differently. Roots only have the apical meristem at the end of the root and do not contain axillary meristems to grow branches. Instead, the branches grow out from the stem of the root from the pericycle tissue in the vasuclarture of the root, so branches can grow out from any location of that vasculature. This causes branching patterns in root to be unpredicatable as they do not rely on a specific stem cell organ to cause the branching. Also, roots contain root hairs that are often confused for branches. Root hairs are different as they are created from single cells that grow out in organized directional growth to increase the surface area of the root, increasing with it the ability to uptake water and nutrients. 

The nuclear envelope in eukaryotic cells has an extremely important job: organizing and protecting the genetic material of a cell while allowing it to be manipulated as needed to allow for proper life sustaining functions. Most people learn about the nucleus of a cell in their first basic biology course in middle school, yet the actual functions of the nucleus are often obscured and simplified beyond the truth. The nuclear membrane consists of thousands of proteins embedded in the lipid bilayer that act as pores for enzymes, transcription factors, and other signaling molecules to pass through. The nuclear envelope itself has a significant involvedment in the cellular cytoskeleton as the location and movement of the nucleus is highly regulated. Nuclear lamina are the intermediate filaments proteins around the nuclear membrane. The lamina has two types of proteins that do not co-localize. Type A is associated with the nuclear pore protein complexes specifically and type B is restricted to the organizing fibers, and is constitutivly expressed and can always be detected in nuclei (Xie).

Xie W, Burke B. Nuclear networking. Nucleus. 2017;8(4):323–330. doi:10.1080/19491034.2017.1296616