Writing in Biology

As the semester comes to an end, reflecting on past work and classes begins. When I was first told that Biology Writing was one of the major requirements, I wasnt so exciting as I would not consider myself as a 'good' writer. However, as the semester began my attitude for the the clas in general grew more positive. I learned more than I had orginally thought that I would and gained more experience in writing that would be further used to write in my career. As biology majors, a majority of the writing consists of writing lab reports and I think that everything that we did in this class will help better improve my writing in future pieces/projects. Being able to write clearly and accurately is an important skill. One of the major points I've learned in this class, is to be straightforward and to the point when explaining a concept and to always use numbers as numericals are used in a lot of discussion and result sections. 

Alcohol, in recreational terms is a component of fermented fluids such as beer and wine. It is produced through fermentation. Fermentation for producing alcoholic beverages is done by microbes, specifically yeast. The yeast break down the sugar in juices or grains and turns it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. However, there the chemical mechanisms behind alcohol production is so precise that presence of oxygen from the air during the production of alcohol could result in ethanoic acid rather than alcohol. In the US, statistics reveal that 52.2% of the population 12 years of age or older were alcohol drinkers, of which 6.3 percent were heavy drinkers (National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2013). It is the most common abused drug in the US. Affects of alcohol include alteration in cognition, which includes abnormal or confused thinking. Most recreational users however, do recover. 

The idea behind Pleistocene Park is that recreating the grasslands that dominated Pleistocene will slow the thawing of the permafrost and “solve” climate change. The theory is that grasslands will reflect more sunlight and make the Arctic absorb less heat, while also reducing how insulated the ground is during the winter to allow the seasonal freeze to reach further into the ground and keep the permafrost frozen. Just knocking down the trees and shrubs that currently inhabit Beringia is not enough though, as they will continue to grow back. The Pleistocene grasslands were maintained by large grazing herbivores that encouraged the co-evolution of grasses; particularly mammoths, which routinely knocked down any trees that tried to grow, thereby keeping the grasslands intact. This is why the Russian scientists are attempting to bring large proboscideans back to the Arctic: so they can beat back the forests and encourage grasslands that might stop the thawing and the carbon-happy gases inhabiting the permafrost from being released into the atmosphere and making orders of magnitude increases to the effects of climate change.

Bacteriome in armored scale insects, females are diploid while the males are haploid. When it is time to reproduce one set of chromosomes has to be silenced or destroyed. There is an organ called the bacteriome. The bacteriome does not have the same number of chromosomes present compared to the rest of the insect’s body. In order to find out why the bacteriome does not have the same number of chromosomes, fluorescent imaging was used to visualize where the chromosomes are at all times. It is found that there is doubling of the DNA in the nucleus and that the cells are mostly in a diploid state throughout its life. Which was found predominately in females. There were three times the number of diploid cells found compared to haploid cells in males. Thus, the populations are dominantly female. The reason for the lower number of bacteriome chromosomes present in the insects is because bacteriome does not make up a large number of the body’s cells. 

In order to acquire a personalized pancreatic cancer treatment profile, sequences of immunologically active tumor neoantigens must first be identified. An MRI will be performed on the patient to detect locations of pancreatic cancer throughout the body (Raman and Fishman, 2018). Although CT scans are also used for the same purpose, the MRI is safer for the patient’s long-term health as it is not irradiative and carcinogenic. To obtain a representative sample of cancerous tissue with as many neoantigens as possible, the PancreAss Kickers will biopsy regions of high tumor cellularity (Cullinan et al. 2018). PBMCs will be isolated from a blood sample, plated, and differentiated into dendritic cells through treatment with interleukin 4 (IL-4) and granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF). This process takes approximately a week (Geissmann et al. 2010). CD4+ and CD8+ T cells will also be isolated in this initial blood sample and set aside for later.

Beavers build dams, which slow down or block running water to create ponds and wetland areas. Because water flow is slowed, any nutrient-rich sediment or soil that is carried in it will trapped in the pond (Puttock et al, 2017). These nutrients will be added to the wetland ecosystem because they will be taken up from the soil by plants in and around the pond, which will then be eaten by fish and terrestrial herbivores. In addition to recycling nutrients through the ecosystem via excretion, these organisms may also be eaten by carnivores, which will also add to the cycling of nutrients.

Healthcare in the United States has been an ongoing challenge for the past few decades. The U.S. has a specific way of how its organizes its healthcare compared to other countries. The health care is based on private providers and insurers paid by individual American citizens that covers them for medical fees, visits, exams, and other health-care related costs. In many other countries, such as Canada and European countries, the government provides a single-payer healthcare system. Unlike the U.S. healthcare that is based on the profits of insurers, the single-payer healthcare is controlled by the government and covers all medical costs for all citizens. Families with high or low income are guaranteed medical insurance and will receive equal medical treatment. Higher taxes and reduction in other governmental budgets allow the system to be financed and provide quality care that covers necessary medical needs.

The PancreAss Kickers will take a personalized adoptive cell transfer and cancer vaccination immunotherapy approach to eradicating pancreatic cancer. Identification of expressed and immunologically active tumor-specific neoantigens in each patient will be performed in vitro and resulting neoantigens will be engineered into two genes. One gene construct will be incorporated into dendritic cells grown from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and will express the neoantigens endogenously, while the other will be incorporated into eosinophils and will result in the secretion of neoantigens into the extracellular environment due to a signal sequence. After dendritic cell activation, presentation of neoantigens via MHC classes I and II will lead to subsequent activation of both CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Both types of T cells along with dendritic cells and PBMCs will be incorporated into a vaccine administered to the patient, and the resulting immune response to the pancreatic cancer will abolish it.  

The term epigenetics was first used by Conrad Waddington in 1942 to describe how, through the process of development, a genotype produces a phenotype. In coining the term, Waddington combined the words epigenesis, the development of an embryo, with genetics, the study of genes and heredity. Waddington’s goal was to encourage the merging of genetics and development. However, his use of the term preceded our modern understanding of DNA and chromosome structure, and today, epigenetics has taken on a narrower meaning.

Intelligent design advocates however are unable to provide true real flaws in evolutionary theory. For the Behe example, he uses the example of the flagellum as a irreducibly complex trait in an organism that therefore it must have been created by a designer. Even if it was even possible to be able to determine if a trait must have been created by a designer, scientist have found that when removing parts of the flagellum that it still functions just not in the same way. This addition on a different function or even addition on to no function can lead traits in organisms that arise naturally that have complex functions that seem irreducibly complex. Another argument we see to try to discredit evolution is in the Bill Nye and Ken Ham debate when Ken brings up how different types of radiometric dating contradict each other when trying to use them to determine the age of the earth. This completely ignores that fact the we understand that certain radioactive isotopes have different half lives and that after a certain amount of time decaying the quantities will be too small to continue to be able to provide accurate readings from and the we know this and factor these things in when we are trying to determine age. Even though that disproving evolution doesn't get the hypothesis of Intelligent design any closer we still dont see any legitimate arguments that are able to poke these hole in evolution and since there is no evidence that intelligence  must have been behind life as we know it there is no real reason to teach this in a science classroom as if it was a real "Controversy"