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Creating a new species of animal requires many generations of reproductive isolation leading to evolutionary divergence. Plants do not have this requirement for speciation, the process of becoming a new species. Instead, have the capacity to bring about a new species in one generation. In animals having more chromosomes than the baseline may cause inviability problems in the offspring and result in their death. However, in plants, if an offspring receives 2 copies of DNA from parent AA and 2 copies from parent BB then the offspring AABB is viable. It is a completely new species. One such example is the bread wheat we use today. It has 42 chromosomes and has genetic material from 3 other species. The first set of species to cross were Einkorn wheat and Wild Goat Grass resulting in a new species known as Durum wheat. 14 chromosomes AA from the Einkorn and 14 chromosomes BB from Wild Goat Grass came together making 28 chromosome Durum wheat AABB. A second crossing event occurred when 28 chromosome AABB Durum grass crossed with 14 chromosome DD T. tauschii to form 42 chromosome AABBDD bread wheat.

    How is it that plants generate new plants with different chromosome counts? There are 2 ways it may happen. Allopolyploidy, the crossing of 2 different plant species or Autopolyploidy, the self crossing of two gametes from 1 species. Allopolyploidy occurs when gametes of 2 plants are able to fertilize and form one cell that contains half the information from each parent plant. The chromosomes duplicate producing a new chromosome count and therefore a new species. Autopolyploidy requires a non-disjunction event in either the first or second split of the parent reproductive cell. A non-disjunction event is when all the genetic material is pulled towards one side or the other resulting in a cell that contains double the genetic material.

In the 1960s, there was a request for understanding the reach of right material to the right audience. During the segmentation phase of the U.S. market, businesses took advantage of radio and especially t.v. to sell their messages to the consumer. Advertising not only opened the consumer to a variety of information, but also enabled them to a greater variety of goods and services. The article points out that t.v. was the main method of choice for advertisement because it gave individual brands their very own identity. In the end, the introduction of the television to American families revolutionized the strategies of marketing. Television allowed marketers to apply their advertisements to a broad range of audience. This phase of U.S. marketing allowed for the one on one relationship of the seller and the customer. This close relationship strategy of the producer and consumer of the 1960s can be witnessed in the modern world. Today, the key function of social media is allowing more producers to interact with their customers. Social media is serving as a structure that not only producers, but also consumers to critique and rate back their service. This in sense is pushing companies and brands to question where they can improve their products and how they can go about it. 

Vaccines are extremely important for the health of our society as a whole. Vaccines do not only work to protect the recipient, they protect immunocompromised individuals in the population. Vaccines work by training your immune system to fight specific diseases. Many deadly diseases have been almost eraticated in the United States because of the high rates of vacinations. If a high percentage of individuals in a population are vaccinated for a certain disease, it makes it difficult for that disease to infultrate the community. This is how immunocompromised individuals are proteccted from diseases. An individual who is undergoing chemotherapy cannot be vaccinated, they are thereofre vulnerable to diseases. If that individual lives in a community with high rates of vaccination, it is much less likely that the disese will enter the community and infect that individual. Some individuals choose not to vaccinate their children, this is a big problem for everyone. These children are not only more susseptible to diseases, but they are endangering individuals who depend on herd immunity. There are certain pockets in America with high rates of unvacinated children. These communities could easily cause an epidemic of a previusly eradicated disease. Travel is made easy in today's world; this can spread disease from foreign countries to the US. If an unvaccinated individual contrcts this disease, it could cause an epidemic in the United States.

In order to understand the human body, model organisms are used as replacements for humans in experiments.  These organisms are chosen for a variety of factors.  First, they must be genetically similar to humans or have enough similarities in the area of study.  Next, they need to have a short generation span so the effects of the study can be observed through the entire lifespan and into furture generations.  During their lifespan, model organisms need to produce a large number of progenies to increase the sample size of the population.  The gene crosses must be controlled as well and they must be suited to live in lab settings.  Finally, the organisms need to have an accumulated body of knowledge.

There are a variety of model organisms used in reasearch.  The type of organism chosen is determined based on the focus of the research.  Some common types of model organisms include E. coli and saccharomysoes.    E. coli is a species of bacteria.  Despite being a single-celled prokaryote, they have significant value to scientific studies.  They are especially useful in studying cell respiration.  Saccharomyoes or yeast is another type of organims used in laboratory settings.  Scientists use this model organims to study processes like protien scretion, control of the cell cycle, and cell differentiation.  

Chromatin Immunoprecipitation is an important molecular tool used to discover all parts of the genome that a transcription factor can bind to. Chromatin Immunoprecipitation, or CHip-Seq, involves the use of antibodies that bind to the transcription factor of choice in order to withdraw all the genetic material from the cells. The first step requires the crosslinking of proteins and DNA together. Once the Transcription factor has been attached to the DNA, the DNA is sheared into 300 base pair segments. Next beads with antibodies that recognize a specific transcription factor are added so that the DNA-transcription factor complex binds to it. The immunoprecipitation part of this experiment involves centrifuging the substance so that a pellet is formed containing only the beads that are attached to the DNA-transcription factor complex. The protein is then uncrosslinked from the DNA and the short strands now get sequenced. The sequenced DNA portions are then mapped on the genome to see where the transcription factors bind. This experiment can reveal valuable information when combined with RNA-Seq. RNA-Seq will give all the genes that are acitive so overlapping the results of a CHip-Seq test will tell you what genes are activated by a specific transcription factor.

A topic of life science I would like to explore is homeopathy, an alternative take to medicine. Homeopathy is defined as a system of alternative medicine based on the doctrine "like cures like," claiming that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people. Homeopathy is interesting because as a student who wants to practice medicine in the future, the idea of injecting a virus into a sick patient to make them feel better contradicts what's taught in class. It is common knowledge that medication is used to cure a disease, which opposes homeopathy. Another doctrine that homeopathy follows is "potentization." The claim states that disease-causing ingredients in a substance would be more potent in a diluted setting, enhancing the effects. This doctrine does not make sense either because the more diluted a solution, the less concentrated/powerful it is. An external resource goes so far to say that if scientists want a single atom of the disease-causing substance (the most powerful way to enhance the effects), you must dissolve the single atom into 1*10^20 parts of water, making a pill that would be as long as the distance from the Earth to the Sun (150,000,000 km), "a pill so massive it would collapse into a black hole under its own mass." The third doctrine that backs the second one up is that "miasms" exist in solution. Essentially, a "bad air" or "spirit-like essence" is left inside the solution after extreme dilution, making the solution useable. We now know today that these doctrines are not true, and we do scientific research and experiments to understand what works and what does not work. 

At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, Janelle Ayres and her colleagues had many mice that got sick. Ayres and her colleagues had infected mice with Citrobacter rodentium, which in turn inflamed the colons of the mice. Half of the mice lived, and half died. These mice all had an identical lifestyle, they all ate the same and did the same activities during the day. The point of this experiment was to determine what causes genetically identical mice to respond differently to certain pathogens. She realized that the mice that died, did not have sufficient iron. Thus, she decided to treat the living mice (with pathogen C. rodentium) with iron supplements. This was a rather holistic approach, as she did not go in with full war to try to use antibiotics, and drugs that can later develop resistance in the mouse. This approach supplies to the internal system of the mouse, which boosts the immunity of the mouse, rather than targeting the pathogen with an antibiotic. 

Phytophagy is the act of consuming plants. This can be done in many ways and evidence of this is all around us. Right here on campus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, phytophagy is present in the form of insects consuming leaves. On a warm sunny day in fall around 4:00pm on a Friday I left the BCRC room in Morrill Science Center III south by taking a right down the hallway. At the end of the hallway I took a left and then entered a large door into a stair well. Through the big heavy door, there is the stair well that has the walls painted with various themes of science. I began descending the stairs. I walked to the very bottom of the stair well and opened the door to a new hallway where I took a left. I went through a set of doors, down a short set of stairs and through the last set of doors finally stepping outside. I walked down the side walk to the left. I saw a small set of stairs on my right about 40 feet from the door I just exited; leading me to a crosswalk at the bottom. I then went down those stairs. I crossed the crosswalk located at the bottom of the stairs. I was sure to look both ways before crossing the street and made sure no cars where coming. Once across the street I walked across the east lawn heading in the direction of the library tower. At the edge of the campus pond there are two granite benches. The bench on the left is located between two trees. The tree on the right in-between the two benches has a small shoot growing from the base of the adult tree. This shoot is located on the side of the tree closest to the Morrill Science Center buildings. Halfway up this shoot is a leaf that has three large wholes in the center of the leaf almost in a clover shape. It also has two smaller holes towards the apex of the leaf one on each side of the main venation of the leaf. On the left side of the leaf there is a series of holes in what looks like a “cancer ribbon” shape. In my left hand I held the leaf and a ruler on the inches side to show that the leaf is approximately 2 inches long which is approximately 5 centimeters. I held the leaf and measured it with the stem to the left and the apex to the right. I took the picture with my phone.

There are 7 types of popular edible seaweed: Wakame, Kombu, Nori, Dulse, Hijiki, Irish Moss, and Sea Lettuce. It is a part of the diets of many cultures which border the ocean, and is especially popular in Japan. Seaweed has a salty, rich, and savory taste due both to the environment it grows in and amino acids called glutamates which greatly enhance its unique flavors. Often labeled as a super food, seaweed contains a wide variety of minerals (sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, iodine, and iron to name a few) and important vitamins including A, C, E, and B12. Seaweed is not only a relatively easy and abundant food to grow, but one which will offer excellent nutritional benefits to those who consume it. 

From an agricultural perspective, the cultivation of edible seaweed is far more environmentally conscious than traditional farming and its corresponding crops. It can either be maintained and harvested from naturally occurring clusters, or grown in isolated areas specifically for cultivation. No deforestation and fertilization of land is needed to successfully grow seaweed crops so it has little impact on the terrestrial environment. The plant itself is excellent at absorbing CO2, which has continued to build up in the ocean along with increasing acidity. Since seaweed absorbs so much carbon, it can also be used as a carbon donor to other environments which are very carbon poor. This plant also has great potential to be used as a biofuel and if brought into the energy industry could provide an extremely environmentally conscious alternative to traditional fuels. 

Currently, Asian-Pacific countries lead the world in agricultural seaweed production. If the coastal countries of the would invest in commercial seaweed production, the impact could be drastic. The problem is that not every culture has accepted seaweed into its diet. For most of the eastern world, seaweed is not considered a particularly valuable food source. If cultures and societies could accept seaweed, production would increase dramatically. 

Over the past few years, scientists and farmers alike have become more aware of the positive effect seaweed cultivation has on the environment. As the planet continues to change both on land and in the sea, it is important to do all we can as a species to try and reverse the damage we have caused. Agricultural production of seaweed is just one step in the process.