lpotter's blog

Figure 1. Red Eyed Tree Frog. Red Eyed Tree Frogs perch on flower buds when looking for prey. Insects that they hunt tend to fly near flowering buds allowing the perched Red Eyed Tree Frog to easily catch the passing insect. Red Eyed Tree Frogs that perch on budding flowers have exhibited a higher yield of captured prey. Photo by Ralph Earlandson avaliable at: https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7374/9754481823_b0114636a1_z_d.jpg

I am currently taking a biochemistry course. And I am just learning that there is way more to amino acids than I previously thought. I took cellular and molecular biology and we talked about how there were polar and nonpolar, hydrophobic and hydrophilic amino acids, etc. But I never knew how many different properties could go into changing amino acid structure and how that would ultimately change a protein's structure and function. When amino acids are in an acidic environment both alpha groups (amino and carboxyl) are deprotonated. When they are at a physiological pH of approximately 7 then only the amino group is protonated while the carboxyl group is still deprotonated. Then when amino acids are in a very basic environment both the amino and carboxyl groups are protonated. This will affect how these amino acids interact with one another and how they come together to form a structure. When these structures or chains of amino acids come together and fold up and join other folded up chains they function as proteins. But whether or not the protein is in a basic or an acidic environment affects how it’s monomers, the amino acids, are behaving. This is part of the reason why it is so crucial for your body to maintain a constant pH as to not interrupt or disturb the function of many different proteins.

In lab we did an experiment of finding out what bacteria are in the environment around us. We did this by swabbing our environment and then inoculating a plate of TSA (Trypticase soy agar) a non-selective or differential media. For my environmental swabs I chose my water bottle mouth piece and my dogs mouth. I swabbed both with seperate swabs and inoculated two different plates. The results were kind of gross. Both plates were lawns, which means there was so much bacterial growth over the 5 day long incubation that there wasn’t a single isolated colony. It was a little surprising that my water bottle had so much bacteria on it, but now that I think about it it makes a lot of sense. Your mouth has countless different types of bacteria in it so it would make sense that anything you put your mouth on has countless different types of bacteria in it. And my for my dog’s mouth, well he’s a dog. I was expecting that to be super gross. I wish that we had other plates to select or promote certain bacterial growth just to see the diversity of bacteria that is growing everywhere in the world around us. Some girl did a soda gun at work and came back with similar results to my plates. That seems really gross. At least with my bottle it is the bacteria that belongs to me and is always living inside of my mouth. I would prefer not to drink the bacteria of people serving me soda.

A disease that was once essentially eradicated from the nation is making a very scary come back. Measles is a highly infectious disease. It infects pretty much anyone that it comes in contact with. It is able to do this because the virus particles are especially small and travel in droplets like spit and mucus through the air. If is so infectious that if someone who is infected with it sneezes in a room anyone walking into the room within the coming hours will very likely contract measles. There is an outbreak currently in oregon and washington that is very concerning just because measles is so contagious and there is a large population of people who haven’t been vaccinated against measles in that area. The government is trying to track the cases of people with measles and measles has made it’s way into a lot places. For example an infected person went to a Portland trail blazers game exposing thousands of people in a relatively confined area. An infected person has visited the airport infecting thousands more. This is a really scary virus and many people have now been exposed. The number of sick people is currently around 45 which is way higher than the normal 1 to 2. This virus was effectively eliminated from the United States but now due to anti-vaxxers and unprotected world travelers it has made it’s way back and will definitely cause a lot of harm to those infected.

A health official came in and spoke with my class today. She spoke on the importance of vaccination, outbreak protocols, what diseases must always be reported, and how many diseases are currently affecting Massachusetts. For the most part Massachusetts has a relatively high vaccination rate as schools require children to be vaccinated prior to enrollment. The only way around this is with religious or medical exemption. Currently Massachusetts is seeing a wave of people claiming that their religion bars them from receiving vaccination. Some areas are seeing up to 20% of people go unvaccinated. This is very troubling and potentially very dangerous. With that many vulnerable people and outbreak is only waiting to happen. The health official didn’t know what to make of this religious exception trend, however speculation is that anti-vaxxers are creating false statements to avoid vaccination. She also talked about the trouble of tracking down the cause of outbreaks and who may have been exposed to an outbreak. They have to track down everyone and confirm that they are either immune, don’t have the disease, or they are quarantined. It takes a lot of people and a lot of time to complete all of these tasks. That is why many infectious diseases, if even suspected to be found, must be immediately reported by law in order to avoid a public health crisis.

Vaccines are very important to the general well being of the public. I have recently been doing a research project on the many outbreaks caused by pertussis, better known as whooping cough. It is a scary disease that can be easy transmitted. Everyone can contract pertussis, but primarily infants are the ones who are horribly affected by it or even killed. Vaccines against pertussis have recently been changed to a DTaP vaccine. This vaccine employs the use of acellular pertussis which means that only part of the bacteria is present within the vaccine. The vaccine used to be DTwP, which used the whole cell. This vaccine lead to many public scares in different nations with major epidemics following the decreased rates of vaccinations. Unfortunately we are still seeing cases of pertussis in many regions of the world. This may be due to the fact that the DTaP vaccine is slightly less effective than the DTwP vaccine, additionally we are seeing a new wave of anti-vaxxers. People have begun refusing vaccines unaware of the damage that they may cause to those around them. The way that most infants get sick from pertussis is by someone close to them that exposes them to the disease. The way to protect infants and people that can’t, for whatever reason, be vaccinated is to get vaccinated yourself and create a herd immunity. This has effectively eradicated diseases in certain regions of the world but many are still vulnerable.

Vaccines are very important to the general well being of the public. I have recently been doing a research project on the many outbreaks caused by pertussis, better known as whooping cough. It really is a scary disease that can be spread with ease. Everyone can contract pertussis, but primarily infants are the ones who are horribly affected by it or even killed. Vaccines against pertussis have recently (within the last 20 years) been changed to a DTaP vaccine. This vaccine employs the use of acellular pertussis which means that only part of the bacteria is present within the vaccine. The vaccine used to be DTwP which used the whole cell. This vaccine lead to many public scares in different nations with major epidemic following the decreased rates of vaccinations. Unfortunately we are still seeing cases of pertussis in many regions of the world. The DTaP vaccine is slightly less effective than the DTwP vaccine, additionally we are seeing a new wave of anti-vaxxers. People have begun refusing vaccines unaware of the damage that they may cause to those around them. The way that most infants get sick from pertussis is by someone close to them that exposes them to the disease. The way to protect infants and people that can’t, for whatever reason, be vaccinated is to get vaccinated yourself and create a herd immunity. This has effectively eradicated diseases in certain regions of the world but many are still vulnerable.

I am now doing a project on the role of antivaxxers and the spread of infectious disease for one of my classes. There are very apparent trends between the 2. For example in Japan Pertussis more commonly known as whooping cough was down to less than 100 cases per year. Then some time in the late 70s there was a scare about the vaccine, people in turn stopped receiving the vaccination for whooping cough. Cases sky rocketed into the 1000s and a disease that was nearly eradicated was now thriving again. In the 80s people starting receiving the vaccine again and the disease fell back into the double digits of cases per year. Unfortunately we are seeing similar trends of denying vaccinations in the US. In particular we have been experiencing a bad measles outbreak. A disease that was absent from the US for quite some time. It was brought back recently when an unvaccinated person traveled to the another part of the world contracted it and returned home. The person lived in a population with low MMR vaccination rates. Measles bagan to spread to to other communities with low vaccination and all of the sudden this disease that was once a thing of the past is now prevalent again essentially because people willing chose not to vaccinate. This now puts people who medically can’t be vaccinated at a serious risk of contracting infectious disease because now the people around them can spread it.  

I recently watched both the movie Outbreak and the movie Contagion. Both movies were incredibly entertaining. Outbreak focused on a virus that the military weaponized and covered up. They released the virus in an African village to watch the effects they then destroyed the village to make sure no one would know that the virus existed. The military failed to contain the virus and it got out and lived within a population of monkeys. This population was discovered by scientists and later brought back to the United States. Someone trying to make money from the virus smuggled one of the mokeys out of a lab and the virus mutated and became airborne once it got transferred to a human host. So then it gets out and an entire town gets infected and quarantined. They eventually make a vaccine and the townspeople are saved. Contagion is a little bit more extreme. It follows a virus that was brought from china back to the States and all over the world. It managed to infect 1 in 12 people around the world killing a vast majority of them. The movie focuses on how society would essentially crumble while everyone worries about getting infected with an incredibly infectious pathogen. At the end of the movie it shows a cut scene of how the outbreak started. Bats harboring a virus transferred it to pigs. The pigs then were slaughtered and sent out to be eaten. The chef preparing the pig at a bar in China didn’t wash his hands and was interrupted in the middle of preparing it. The chef then walks out and shakes hands with a girl who later touches her face, then comes in contact with many people traveling to many parts of the globe. It is incredible how fast a competent pathogen can spread when the perfect storm of scenarios happen.

In my biochem class today we were discussing the folding of proteins and how whatever structure they are in affects the function that they perform. One protein can change it’s structural conformation based off so many different factors. They can change because of their environment, because of signals they receive, and because of other proteins that they interact with. It is incredible to think how little we actually know about the world around us. We might be able to identify all of the proteins in one species but we are not able to identify the function of a vast majority of them. These proteins that we are trying to understand are also always change shape and function so that further complicates making a catalog of all proteins. On top of that we aren’t even able to identify all living species on Earth, we just have an estimate and may never know how many organisms actually inhabit our planet. With all of these unidentified species lay many unidentified proteins. I don’t think it will be anytime soon that someone devises a way to identify every protein within an organism is a relatively quick fashion. Additionally finding the function of the identified proteins will take exponentially longer. So much of science is just guess and check and concrete answers can take forever to find if they are able to be found at all.