Blogs

Finding and Capturing Pictures of the Plant

I went to Durfee Greenhouse in between 10am-4pm. I entered through the door that’s closest to the Integrative Learning Center. The plant I found was the very first plant to my right that was in a square pot. Its name is Camellia Japonica. I took a picture of the whole plant while standing in front of the entrance and diagonal to the plant. I took an up-close picture of a few flowers that were close together. These flowers had sun shining on them unlike the ones in the shade.

I made a multi panel figure that displays photographs of a flowering plant and a map of the plants origin. The plant I chose is a Cattleya hybrid known as Cattleya ‘War Paint’. Cattleya is a type of orchid that can be found anywhere from Costa Rica south to Argentina.

I found this plant in the Durfee Conservatory located on the campus of Umass Amherst. I entered the conservatory from its front entrance, near Thatcher Way and went through the building until reaching the Epiphyte/Vine House. There were shelves of plants on the right side of the room and the Cattleya was the first one in the row. I took three photographs of the plant. The first was taken from the front which included the entire plant and pot with the tag “Cattleya ‘War Paint’” showing. The plant had two flowers, one to the rear and one lower and in front; I took a close up of the front flower next to a ruler in mm for my other two photographs. One is with the ruler horizontal against the flower and the other is with the ruler vertical.

A chemotherapy drug that would link with CB-839, a glutiminase inhibitor would be docetaxel. Docetaxel is known as a antimicrotubule agent. This means that it inhibits the formation of microtubules. Microtubules are highly involved in replicating and pulling apart chromosomes and sister chromatids throughout various stages of the cell cycle. Microtubules are known to be unstable. They contain a plus and minus end. The plus end is referred to as beta and the minus end as alpha. Tubulin is the building blocks of microtubules. Tubulin assembly can happen at either end of the microtubule. When outside the cell it is most favorable at the plus end and depolymerization happens on the minus end. Inhibition of the formation of microtubules will collapse and will result in cell death. Overall, the use of docetaxel with Cb-839 will be a great contribution to targeting KRAS-driven lung adenocarcinoma.

In the few cases in which antibody drug conjugates have already been used, the method has proven effective. In one instance, monoclonal ADCs were used in a clinical trial for patients with colorectal cancer. The specific antibody that was used, A7, was utilized as the drug carrier. The drugs mitomycin C (MMC) and neocarzinostatin (NCS) were covalently bound to A7, and the resulting ADCs were named A7-MMC and A7-NCS. In the end the conjugates were found to have a stronger effect on the cancer cells than plain MMC or NCS, and compared to the normal method of treatment which was less effective in that it spread evenly in all tissues, whereas the conjugates were concentrated mostly in the tumor cells (Kitamura K et al., 1988). Many involve the understanding and development of other types of antibodies (not ADCs, but simply antibodies) that have proven in many cases to be more effective than past methods of cancer treatment.

It is well known that the first few weeks of an infants life is crucial to their overall development and health. A recent study decided to be more specific and discover what type of effects their nutrient intake has on them. The study found that increased lipid intake within the first two weekd of birth increased total braing and basal nuclei volumes. This initial growth in the first two weeks proves to be beneficial in the long term growth over the course of the infants birth. In certain cases of premature babies the energy and nutrient intake in the first two weeks is specifically important to promote long term health and brain development. The study even went further to conclude that the nutrient take in the first two weeks could possibly correct any lack in development premature babies may experience as early as 18months. This possibility of correction is truly fascinating considering the complexity of the human bosy and the growth process required in infant development.

Theory: broad explanation and prediction concerning phenomena of interest
EX: Diffusion of Responsibility Theory: the more # of bystanders/witnesses to an event that calls for helping behavior, the more responsibility for
helping is perceived to be shared by all, therefore the more people, the smaller the share of responsibility/person
- how do we test this theory? formulate an operational definition of the hypothesis by conceptualizing it in a way that could be tested
Hypothesis: narrow prediction stated in a way that allows it to be tested
Operational Definition: the translation of a hypothesis into specific, testable procedures that can be measured and observed in an experiment
• Protection of participants from physical and mental harm.
• The right of participants to privacy regarding their behavior.
• The assurance that participation in research is completely voluntary.
• The necessity of informing participants about the nature of procedures before their participation in the experiment.
• All experiments must be reviewed by an independent panel before being conducted
Informed Consent: a document that participiants must sign and is key to ethical principles
- Participant must sign a document affirming that:
1.) they have been told the basic outlines of the study and are aware of what their participation will involve,
2.) what risks the experiment may hold, and
3.) the fact that their participation is purely voluntary and they may terminate it at any time
- The only time informed consent and a debriefing can be eliminated is in experiments in which the risks are minimal, as in a purely observational study in a public place
Bias: comes from both the expectations of the experimenter and the participant, preconcieved notions, etc
Placebo: false treatment
Double-blind procedure: the experimenter doesn’t know who was given the placebo and who was given the drug for example
types of descriptive research: Archival, Naturalistic Observation, survey, and case studies
- Archival: inexpensive, but could be in incorrect form, incomplete, collected haphazardly
- Naturalistic: record what you see, people in their “natural habitat”, but inability to control factors of interest
- Survey: sample chosen to represent group of interest/population, but could not be representative of the population, need a “random sample,” lying
Random Sample: everyone has an equal chance of being included in the survey
- Case Study: in-depth, often include psychological testing, drawback is that each individual is unique therefore it’s hard to make generalizations
Psychological Testing: a procedure in which a carefully designed set of questions is used to gain some insight into the personality of the person
Correlational Research: two sets of variables are examined to determine if they correlate
- when 2 variables are strongly correlated, it is easy to assume that one causes the other,
EX: studying more gives you higher grades is just a guess, but it does help us make predictions
- correlational findings do not permit us to determine causality, there could be so many more other factors involved
experiments are the only way to establish cause and effect relationships!
- conditions are created and controlled by the researcher = experimental manipulation
- the manipulation cannot be viewed by itself, in isolation; if a cause-and-effect relationship is to be established, the effects of the manipulation must be compared with the effects of no manipulation or a different kind of manipulation
- hypothesis predicts how a dependent variable depends on the manipulation of the independent variable

This is where the two paths diverge. With the discovery of nuclear fission both countries started nuclear programs, but the amount of resources dedicated to them varied greatly. In the US, the program started slowly. At the start of the program the idea of a nuclear weapon was a distant thought. In a letter written to Winston Churchill by Bohr in 1944, he recalls that a few years prior the idea of a complete and functioning bomb was a “fantastic dream” (Bohr Letter). Allied British scientists thought that the bomb wouldn’t be a weapon of this war, but one for the future due to the vast amount of resources needed to produce it. The American’s estimated the costs of the project to be much lower than they actually were when the project was complete. This misplaced optimism may have played a part in their decision to put what is now equivalent to $30 billion dollars into the creation of these weapons. This project was never guaranteed to pay off, and putting this enormous of an effort into something during wartime is a big risk. The German nuclear project was run differently. Instead of focusing only on a nuclear weapon, the Germans set out to harness all facets of nuclear power, including nuclear energy. This meant that the already limited resources of a country at war were to be spread even thinner, making the bomb even less of a priority for Germany (Walker 24-25).

With the advent of technological innovations, humans are now capable of modifying the environment at a previously unprecedented level. Advances in medicine, such as the development of penicillin, have saved countless lives. Modern agricultural methods have vastly improved the amount of food that can be harvested. Building towns and infrastructure has ensured that people are no longer isolated from each other. At first glance it may seem as though these recent changes in human history would halt evolutionary change. However, modern humans certainly still face challenges to survival and exhibit varying reproductive success - the fodder for evolution.

Yesterday I went to a seminar held by Steve Ramirez from Boston University who is studying a way to artificially activate positive and negative memories in healthy and maladaptive states. He explained optogenetic reactivation of hippocampal dentate gyrus neurons activated during fear conditioning were sufficient to induce freezing behaviour.  That is, activating these neurons without actually presenting the mouse with the fear stimulus was sufficient for the mouse to show signs of fear. In a similar proportion of cells, the freezing was not detected upon light-stimulation on ChR2 in non-fear conditioned mice. The freezing, act of fear, was also not detected upon fear-conditioned mice with cells labeled by a different protein instead of ChR2. 

- avoid passive voice “it was concluded” “this was demonstrated” “the fungus was discovered”
- avoid judgements (good, bad, important, smart, sensible, correct, right, etc), use assertions (past tense unless in proposals, present if universal truths)
- avoid vague modifiers “while both the original and replicated figure came out to be about the same, there are a few key differences”, many, few, extreme, basic, simple
- if you need to make estimates use universal comparisons
- avoid personification, “it was taken from above the fungus, looking down onto its face” “the larvae tried to climb out” etc
- avoid conversational speech “just after ___ I found a group of trees that seemed like possible cadiddates for fungus” , thankfully, “it was a beautiful day”, you, idioms, slang “to start off” use “to begin” instead, “have to”
- avoid metaphoric. figurative lang, humor, anaglogies, luck, feelings, exaggeration
- avoid sensationalism/hyperbole: exciting, drastically change the results, unbelieveable, interesting
- avoid personalities “Dr.Brewer told me..” references to individuals, we,us (except as authors of multi-authored paper) names (except cited or in acknowledgements) team names
- avoid references to fantasy or fiction
- avoid narrative “then, then, then”, dialog, suspense, mystery, surprise, drama,