Writing in Biology

This combination of systems proved to be very successful in regaining movement for the patient. In fig. 3A, the different movements are shown with the different muscle contractions. The dot plots show the success rate for virtual and real arm movement; it shows that the movement is above the possibility of chance. The virtual arm was shown to have quicker response, but this is probably due to the lack of strength in the muscles. The patient was given the task of drinking coffee which involved reaching and grasping; this test had success 11 out of 12 times. Fig. 4 shows this action along with the time it took to complete each stage of this function. For this task, the system was turned off to see if any function remained, but showed no movement, thus proving the success in movement is due to the two-part system.

In this experiment the goal was to see the effect of certain factors, in this case acids and bases, of the light absorbance of spinach chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are essential to life for both plants and animals alike, they are crucial in the photosynthetic reaction that produces oxygen and glucose from carbon dioxide, light and water. In the spinach chloroplasts there are two separate photosystems that convert light energy and water to oxygen and glucose. In this experiment the chloroplasts were extracted from approximately six spinach leaves and suspended in grinding buffer. 50 microliters of the chloroplast were then placed into four differently treated test tubes (dark, light, light and vinegar and light with bleach), leaving one test tube without chloroplast as the control group. The light absorbance of each test tube was tested every 10 minutes for 30 minutes. If bleach and vinegar are added to the chloroplast then we can expect the function of chloroplasts to be hindered because the acid and base produce an environment that is outside the optimal ph for functioning chloroplasts. More specifically we can expect the bleach to completely neutralize the chloroplast and for the vinegar to almost completely neutralize the chloroplast, but we can expect limited function. For these predictions to supported we should expect to see the tube with bleach to have 0 light absorbance and for the vinegar treated tube to have a very low light absorbance.

The purpose of this experiment was to examine the life cycle of yeast, its genetics aspect, investigate the different types of gene complementation through genetic crosses, as well as analyze ultraviolet radiation treated yeast cells. This was observed through either a rich medium known as YED media or a minimal media known as MV media. Yeast was examined through its life cycle of going from haploid to diploid to its haploid form again. During this experiment, the haploid strains that were utilized were HB1, HA0, HA1, and HA2. One haploid strain that was able to proficiently synthesize adenine was HA0. The reason being because it has no mutations in ADE genes versus the others which did contain ade mutations. The objective is to see whether complementation is observed and how the genetic crosses come into play. Analyzing the ade gene mutations they contain and how it contributes to growth of colonies of yeast cells. 

The creature that exhibits the most exotic spikes is a trait that draws a female’s attention. Males compete for females that they wish to mate with by using their spikes and claws to obtain a female’s attention. This species is known to communicate through sound. In particular, they make a call which sounds like a whistle and squeal. They love the social life and prefer to not be solitary and not interacting with others of their kind. These organisms climb trees and make a home within the canopy and tall emergent trees. Their coat color of brown resembles that of tree bark and this trait gives them the ability to camouflage on ground floors as well as life above ground. 

Endler’s hypothesis was correct. Predation heavily influences guppy spot brightness. The

data from the second experiment especially supports this hypothesis. It shows that as predation

increases, spot brightness decreases. Endler’s greenhouse experiments show that without

predation, the spot brightness increases substantially over time. However, in the Cichlid ponds,

the spot brightness decreased substantially over time. The data he obtained from the field are also

consistent with the data form the lab. Finally, the data from the second experiment is very similar

and the same conclusions can be drawn.

Using RNAi, we can use a mutagen to silence any gene in almost any organism, enabling us to perform reverse genetics to analyze genes. Sodium azide (NaN₃), a chemical commonly used to cause a transition from an AT to a GC was used on our as a mutagen on our mutant B. distachyon seeds. Sodium azide functions in chemical inhibition of DNA repairs, often creating a base substitution. These changes can result in various mutations including silent, missense, nonsense, or frameshift mutations. In the DNA sequence, we looked for high impact mutations in the coding regions, splice sites, and donor sequences. We found a high impact mutation in our gene that we determined was a nonsense mutation. A nonsense mutation is a point mutation in which a single amino acid is introduced that changes the codon to a stop codon. Stop codons include the amino acids UGA, UAG, and UAA. These codons terminate protein synthesis and thus, a mutation for a stop codon can have a huge impact on an organism (Scovell, 2018).

Most of the time they love to climb trees and hang from them almost like a 3-toed sloth and will stay there for a duration of about 6 hours until they need to find food again which they are able to either in the trees or below ground searching for insects like grasshoppers, beetles, or butterflies. They exhibited convergent evolution to hedgehog line given similar features but being able to climb. I have concluded to give this organism the genus species name, Spica exhibuit meaning spike climber because of its ability to climb and the spikes it exhibits posteriorly.

It seems to be that the creature with the most exotic spikes and one that has many is what draws a female’s attention. Males compete for females that they wish to reproduce with by using their spikes and claws to obtain a female’s attention. Their means of communication is through a call which sounds like a whistle and squeal. Unlike the hedgehogs they love the social life instead of being solitary and not interacting with others of their kind. For shelter these organisms climb trees and make a home within the canopy and tall emergent trees. Their coat color of brown resembles that of tree bark making them able to camouflage underground as well as life above ground. 

Our data demonstrates that mobbing call response is limited in the presence of excessive anthropogenic noise. However, there were inconsistencies such as the weather, time of day and conditions secondary to having a small sample size that may have skewed our results. For example, one trial in the quiet site had construction one morning, resulting in a reading of 56 dB and a limited response, which supports previous trends found. We expected that the trials performed during poor conditions would yield low-quality results and the data seemed followed this trend. Additionally, the noisy feeder had a higher density of individuals initially present despite studies showing that density in noisy areas should, in theory, be lower. We suspect that this may have been related to the food stores of the feeder as easy access to food may supersede the cost of temporarily inhabiting riskier foraging grounds. Finally, our small sample size per variable tested limited the conclusions that we can make regarding the percentages of response.  

These results were consistent with our prediction, hypothesis and the prevailing literature which suggest that anthropogenic noise pollution has profound effects on the efficacy of vocal communication within avian species.  While our data demonstrates that BCCH communication is inhibited by elevated levels of noise pollution, it is less clear if this has a direct effect on reproductive success or species density. The most recent studies suggest that reproductive success should decline and, in response,  the density of individuals within areas of higher noise pollution levels will decrease accordingly. (Francis et al., 2009) Additional studies focusing on banding and tracking individuals within documented areas of various levels of noise pollution and recording their foraging patterns and nesting sites would help demonstrate this.  We predict that this study would show that BCCHs likely nest in areas with lower noise pollution and actively avoid areas of atypical loud background noise while foraging so as to avoid impairing their predator-evasion strategies.