lpotter's blog

Cancer is very scary, however it’s mechanics are incredibly interesting. A cell acquires a mutation that causes it to bypass multiple checkpoints in cell division and divide uncontrollably. The scary part about cancer is that it can happen anywhere and in any tissue. Cancer can also happen for any reason at all. You can be the most healthy person in the world and your cells can make a mistake which leads to uncontrollable division. The worst part is your body doesn’t know to target these cells. Your body provides the cells with energy for them to divide at expedited rates. Your body can’t tell them apart because they are technically your cells, there is nothing that jumps out at the immune system and says hey we aren’t supposed to be here. There are really good drugs to combat cancer. But even with modern techniques and medicine it is still incredibly hard for cancer to be completely beat. And even if the cancer is beat it can come back or it can even come back in a different location of the body. It is honestly incredible that with the amount the cells in our body divide that more cancerous mutations do not develop at all.

One of the coolest videos I have ever seen in a science course was in highschool. It was a timelapse video of a seal that had died getting eaten by other animals in a coral reef. Within a minutes small animals started picking away at the carcass then a few bigger animals passed by and took big chunks out of the seal. The coolest part of the video for me was seeing the starfish walk over and begin to eat the seal carcass. I didn’t even know that starfish were carnivorous, now thinking about it though it makes sense that they are. I managed to find the video on youtube to rewatch it. It really is incredible how the organisms in the coral reef don’t let a carcass go to waste. There was another really cool video of a whale carcass that had fallen to the bottom of the sea. Sharks had clearly taken big pieces before it even hit the ocean floor. Once it did deeper dwelling sharks began to take pieces of whale then came the eels. The eels ate away at the carcass until only bones remained. The circle of life was really beautifully captured in both of these videos. In death these animals gave other life.

This science may not be grounded in reality but I just saw something about the walking dead pop up on snapchat and it got me thinking. I mean the walking dead is supposed to take place over years. There is no way that zombies would still be around, they are dead so there is no cell division and no bodily up keep. Just the weather alone would cause the zombies to just dissolve. If not environmental factors the zombies walking and bumping into things that cause cuts would add up. That one cut would grow and grow until it completely separates the zombie. Then we can think about the bacterial cells that would be invading the zombies. These cells would degrade the rotting flesh and cause the zombies to diminish at an even faster rate. Another zombie scenario is in world war z. Zombies travel into the sea and live at the bottom of the ocean. There is just absolutely no way that these could even be remotely possible. The pressure alone would cause the zombies to pancake and I would imagine that the salt water would degrade their flesh. Also all the animals in the ocean that would pick away at them because they couldn’t react quick enough.

Gram stains are a very basic yet useful technique in determining types of bacterial cells. Gram negative cells have a thin outer membrane that can be easily broken down and dissolved. Gram positive have have the opposite, they have a thick outer coating. Gram stains rely on these two defining traits. The procedure for Gram staining is straightforward. First bacterial cells are placed on a microscope slide. If the cells are being drawn from a liquid solution they can be easily spread on the slide, if the cells are being used from a solid colony water must first be applied to the slide. Once the slide dries it will get heated fixed by passing it through a flame two times. This process ensures that the cells stick to the slide during the stain. The first stain of the bacterial cells is with crystal violet, this will turn the cells a purple color. Once the crystal violet is washed away with water the crystal violet is adhered to the cell after Gram’s iodine is applied. The Gram’s iodine will also be washed away with water. Next, the cells will be treated with ethanol. The ethanol will wash away the outer lining of Gram negative cells but not Gram positive cells. The cells will then be stained with pink safranin. This will turn Gram negative cells pink but will not affect the purple color of Gram positive cells because purple is darker than pink.  

Gram stains are a very basic technique that can be used in the lab to help identify a type of bacterial cell. The process is very easy. First you want to streak a little bit of your sample on to a microscope slide. If the sample is liquid this is fine but if the sample is solid you must first add a drop of water to the slide to make sure that you can spread your sample out on the slide. Once this smear dries you can then heat fix it by passing the slide through a flame very briefly two times. You then apply a few drops of crystal violet to the slide and let them sit there for one minute. After the minute is up wash off the crystal violet with water. Next you repeat this process with Iodine. Next you place a few drops of ethanol on the slide and let them sit for 10 seconds. This washes away any previous stain done. Next you add safranin which is a differential part of the stain. Any gram negative cells will appear as pink, the color of safranin and any gram positive cells will appear as purple because they retained the purple color from the first round of stains.  

For my groups proposal we are looking at ways to bring in more migrating birds to the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. I had no idea how many kinds of birds migrate through Massachusetts. There are so many birds that go south for the winter time and return up north to breed during the spring and summer. This behavior makes a lot of sense because they go to a warmer climate where more resources are available during the winter. For species that migrate up north the warmer climates will become too much for them and they will return up north for a more mild summer and now they will have access to all the resources they need once again. Humans used to do similar migrations until we started having access to anything that we need at any point in the world. If birds had everything that they need anywhere they want it they would never chose to migrate, I don’t think that any species would. I have heard about migration before just from ecology and general biology courses but we never broke down the extent of which birds migrate. Some species travel for thousands of miles and they always know how to retrace the routes that they do. It really is just incredible that birds can travel so precisely without a map.

In my intro to microbiology lab we have been working with many different gram positive and gram negative bacteria. The easiest way to tell the two kinds of bacteria apart is by doing a gram stain. This stains the outer layer of the bacterial cell. Gram positive bacteria will turn a purple color, and gram negative bacteria will turn a pink color. You have to look under a microscope to determine whether or not the bacteria you are testing is gram positive or gram negative. There are also many other tests that you can run to help see if the organism you are working with is gram positive or gram negative and what that specific organism may be. You can plate the organisms on different types of agar and see what the colonies look like. Also if you plate the organisms on a differential or a selective media you can look and see what kind of reaction happens within the media or if the media suppresses bacterial growth. All of these will be very important in determining what organism you are working with. Tests in a medical lab for these organisms are a lot more straightforward to run and more streamlined in order to get a faster result.   

In biochem we are currently going over metabolic pathways. There are anabolic pathways, these pathways require a net input of energy and are endergonic. They are the pathways that are responsible for building complex molecules from less complex molecules. There are also catabolic pathways, these pathways require a net input of energy and they are exergonic. They are the pathways that are responsible for break down of complex molecules into smaller less complex molecules. There are also oxidation and reduction reactions, these are involved in the transfer of electrons between molecules. Oxidation is a reaction when the molecule loses electrons. This would create a more positive charge for the over all molecule, this is because electrons carry a negative charge and without them the molecule loses it’s negative charge. A reduction reaction is when the molecule gains electrons. This would mean that the molecule becomes more negatively charged. Hence why it is called reduced because the charge is decreased. The term that is referring to the affinity a molecule has for electrons is called the reduction potential. This must be tested experimentally in every situation. The metabolism has many complex parts and is incredibly interesting.  

I took some emergen-c the other day because I was starting to feel sick. It has 1000 mg of vitamin c in it, the recommended daily dose is only 75 mg. So I started thinking isn’t 1000 mg a little bit of overkill and I’m pretty sure that it is. Vitamin c is water soluble and is easily washed out of the body. It is additionally easily washed out of the food we cook. So maybe the excess vitamin c is to make sure that the body gets all of it in it’s system. But then the question comes to mind of why the recommended daily dose is only at 75 mg. I am really curious as to how much vitamin c the body actually uses from intake versus what it gets rid of or is unable to use. I’m not convinced that emergen-c actually help your immune system, I think that a cup of orange juice would have the same effect. The cup of orange juice actually has over 75 mg of vitamin c in so you should be all set. I also saw that for smokers the vitamin c recommended dose is increased by 35 mg daily. I wonder if your body processing the smoke takes away from the vitamin c that your body needs.

The people that work there, not the actual facility itself poses the biggest risk for pathogens to escape a biosafety level 4 lab. In order work in a lab like this you must go through extensive background checks. Even your family must go through extensive checks and are subject to heavy scrutinization. This is because the pathogens in labs like this are so incredibly powerful that many people would want to try and use them to cause harm. People in the lab could either try and smuggle out samples of the virus for a payment or to cause serious damage by themselves or both. What I mean by this is that the pathogens could be sold to terrorists, radicalized militant groups, or anyone who wants to cause harm to the general public. Not only would these pathogens be very destructive to the population but they would also be very easily released and spread. If you think about how many people push open a turning door at the subway or airport in a single day you would realize how big of a threat these pathogens pose to the public. If some cases thousands of people could touch that spot in a given day. Now there are thousands of people who bring the pathogen with them and touch something else. They go home to their apartment complex, go to their work at a grocery store, go to the movies. All places where they will come in contact with thousands of more people. This is why the people in these facilities as well as the facilities themselves must be so heavily monitored.