Drafts

Fatty acids are central molecules in lipid metabolism and are the structures that contain most of the energy in a tracylglycerol. The oxidation of these molecules more energy than a molecule of glucose. This is because the C-H bonds that make up fatty acids are highly reduced while in the glucose molecule most of the carbons are bonded to oxygen. These C-O bonds are already oxidized meaning that these bonds dont have energy to be released. Fatty acid oxidation consists of five processes that generally start in the cytoplasm and are carried out in the mitochondria. The first step is acyl-CoA formation. Acyl-CoA formation is a susbtrate of beta oxidation(which is the third step) and is formed in the cytoplasm by acyl-CoA synthetase. This process requires two ATP(adenosine triphosphate). Once acyl-CoA has been formed it can then be transported into the mitochondrial matrix for oxidation. This transport is carried out by carnitine acyltransferase. 

     You see it everywhere. An actor that had to struggle for two years on ramen and slept in their car. The medical student who had to work so hard, staying up every night until 4AM learning just to make sure they can pass their courses and fulfill their dream of becoming a neurosurgeon. The high school students who play 4 different sports, play in 2 different bands, and keep their studies up by getting inadequate sleep everyday until the end of high school. These people are glorified for their unhealthy lifestyles, because they’re sacrificing their life in order to pursue something they really want. It makes sense, but the glorification can be overdone to the point where people with bad study habits, still think they’re doing great because they follow this example yet still perform poorly. This can be seen a lot of the times, when the problem isn’t that they’re so swamped with work they’re forced to study until the early hours of the morning, but instead they develop bad study habits and yet they reward themselves for having these habits. They think “I tried really hard”, when the reality is they didn’t, but just managed their time poorly.

    The way a student looks at the material of a course compared to the teacher is very different. The way a teacher teaches the material, is that the teacher will teach the fundamentals and the scaffolding that’s required in order to understand the material at a deeper level. That makes sense, and that method of teaching shows that if it is understood by the students, the students will remember and understand the material better. Albeit, while some students see the material under this light, and desire to understand how the material works, there are students who view the problems and see them as “obstacles” that need to be overcome, by any means possible. This means these kinds of students see problems, and instead of thinking about “why it works”,  they think “how can I solve it the easiest way possible”? For some material this method of thinking is more beneficial if a student knows the material they are learning is not a measure of their capabilities of actually understanding the material, but rather a measure of their intrinsic motivation to learn the material for an A. This method of “dodging” the content but still passing the course with an A is a flaw of the current education system, due to the fact that the system weighs two individuals who understand and retain the material at different levels, as equals.

Our hypothesis was that exercise will have no effect on body temperature. We recorded a mean resting temperature of 98.24 ºF, and mean temperatures of 97.99 ºF and 98 ºF for the first and second 1-minute sets of jumping jacks respectively. There was a 0.24 ºF drop in temperature after the first set and a 0.25 ºF drop after the second set, which shows that our hypothesis was not supported by the data. There was relatively low variation within the data, with a standard deviation of 0.93 for body temperature at rest, and standard deviations of 0.76 and 0.75 for each respective set of jumping jacks. This finding was supported by the data acquired by the rest of the class: across the data acquired by all four groups, the mean body temperature was 98.59 ºF at rest and 98.26 ºF after both sets of jumping jacks, with standard deviations of 0.86, 0.77, and 0.82 respectively. There was less variance in the forehead temperatures after each set of exercises than the forehead temperatures at rest.

The songs produced by each bird are diverse. Some songs can be soft or high, and others can have short or long notes. Frequency and amplitudes can be studied by creating a graph to visually study the sound of the birds. The higher the amplitude, the louder the song produced by the bird.  The difference between a song and a call is that songs have patterns, syllables, and phrases whereas call is short and simple. Calls are used for multiple situations for defense, conversation, also to attract mates. Most songs are similar to human songs. Each bird has its unique type of calls and vocalization to attract mates. The tempo and frequency are what attract neighbors and predators. Sound travels much further than distance, by using this physical property, birds can communicate with a larger range to other birds. Not only the vocalization produced by the bird itself but also the environment can affect how the bird is heard by other individuals. Some birds like Great Tits that live in the urban area adapted by a vocalization that will not be erased from the traffic noise caused by human activities and other loudness.

Muscle cells use a variety of fuel sources: fatty acids at rest and glucose during exertion, at least initially. Muscle cells also vary widely in their energy demands and use glycogen stores only for themselves, not sharing with other cells. Glycogen breakdown overly exceeds glycogen synthesis by 300-fold, and they do not respond to glucagon. Muscle cells also do not perform gluconeogenesis, fatty acid synthesis, or ketogenesis. On the other hand, liver cells are very important for fatty acid homeostasis, performing triacylglycerol formation and fatty acid synthesis. They are also the primary site of ketone body synthesis and directly regulate blood glucose levels in response to hormones. Liver cells are also important storage sites for glycogen with equal rates of synthesis and breakdown of glycogen. Like muscle cells, liver cells use a variety of fuel sources that change depending on conditions.

A plant called Arabidopsis thaliana was used to conduct three different experiments to explain how mesophyll conductance respond to the environment (Mizokami et al., 2017). One wildtype control called Col-0, two mutations, ost1 and slac1-2, were examined to eliminate factors that may influence the data not to represent an accurate display (Mizokami et al., 2017). Both of these mutants are insensitive to increase in the ABA and external CO2 levels because the stomata do not close properly. These mutations allowed Mizokami et al. to factor out the relationship between the stomatal conductance and the intercellular CO2 (2017). The data were collected and presented in multiple graphs and panels for different scenarios so that the readers could follow along the descriptions.

Immunology is largely based on the recognition and discrimination of self and non-self. Many pathogens have molecular signatures that allow the immune system to recognize and target them for destruction (Janeway Jr. et al. 2002). Unlike most pathogens, tumor cells lack these identifiable molecular signatures, allowing them to evade recognition as “non-self” and subsequently the immune response. Instead, cancer cells display tumor antigens that can be recognized by the immune system. Two such categories of these tumor antigens include tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) and tumor-specific neoantigens, which arise through different mechanisms. TAAs are expressed at low levels in normal tissues but are overexpressed in cancer cells, whereas tumor-specific neoantigens arise via non-synonymous mutations in the tumor itself (Lu et al. 2016). In some cases, these mutations lead to the expression of mutated peptides.

Metabolic pathways must be regulated to release energy when required, to store extra energy, and to synthesize molecules when needed. Specific reactions or enzymes in a mechanism serve as key regulatory steps, and usually they are those with largely negative changes in free energy. These are irreversible reactions that cannot be reversed through the manipulation of cellular conditions. If a chemical reaction in one direction is irreversible, then the opposing pathway must use a different chemical reaction and different regulatory enzyme. Different regulatory enzymes for opposing pathways allows for independent regulation based on cellular conditions, also known as fine-tuning. This is essential for regulating pathways. Regulatory enzymes are often as the beginning or end of a pathway, and the step that commits the pathway to a certain response is also highly regulated.

Lipids are a class of organic compounds that are fatty acids. These lipids are used for energy storage, membrane structure and signaling between organ systems. Lipids are also significantly nonpolar and most are mainly composed of hydrogren and carbon and able to form van der Waals interactions. Triacylglycerols are three fatty acids attached to a glycerol and are formed by dehydration reactions between glycerol hydroxyl groups and fatty acid carboxyl groups. Triacylglycerol are often found in the liver and adipocytes and are main tissues involved in fat metabolism. Material from the digestive system directly enters the liver and biosynthesis of lipoproteins occurs which is then distributed to body cells for energy use.