Drafts

The reaction of plants to stress from their environment, be it the plant’s consumers or the environment, involves a series of pathways which induce defenses (Tian, Peiffer, et al.). These pathways involve several hormones which trigger the defense responses in plants. Jasmonic acid is a hormone that plants release to control the responses from stress, such as damage from weather or herbivores. It has been observed in many studies that applying jasmonic acid onto a tomato plant can be used as a pesticide by inducing defenses plant naturally use to deter herbivores from consuming them (Tian, Tooker, et al.; Tian, Peiffer, et al.). Administering jasmonic acid onto a tomato plant can cause plants to grow more trichomes, which are hair-like structures that grow on the leaf of the plant that make traversing them more difficult for herbivores (Tian, Tooker, et al.). Tomato plants treated with jasmonic acid have been shown to be less preferable to consume by herbivores as a result of secondary compounds produced, and the herbivores that consume them do not grow as large (Tian, Peiffer, et al.). 

Again I am studying for a biochemistry test and as anyone reading this would notice the exam is this week and I am using my 30 minutes of daily writing to help me dive in to concepts with words rather than images or equations. There is many ways to express the activity of enzymes and one way is with the rules that Michaelis and Menten have laid out. They make three assumptions. The first being that there is no k-2. This means that any amount of enzyme product complex is negligible so it isn’t counted, it also means that free enzymes and products will never complete a reverse reaction to return to the enzyme substrate complex. The second assumption is that the concentration of the enzyme substrate complex remains constant when measuring the initial velocity. The third assumption is that Vmax can always be reached, this means that you can always react the most available enzymes with the most available substrates. Putting all of these assumptions together you can fully understand the equation. E+S<->ES<->E+P. E is enzyme, S is substrate, P is product, ES is enzyme substrate complex. You can go back and forth between the free enzymes and free substrates state and the enzyme substrate complex. The rate at which the enzyme substrate complex is formed remains constant. Once you pass the enzyme substrate complex to the free enzyme and product you can no longer return to the enzyme substrate complex. When graphed you can always relate the substrate concentration to the velocity. This is where you can derive the relation Km=[substrate] at ½ Vmax.

I elected to take Resource Economics 212 during the fall semester of my sophomore year for my statistics requirement. The thing I remember most about the course was how to do certain functions on Microsoft Excel or in Google Sheets. I remember some of the functions used on Excel, for example I remember how find the mean, mode, average, and standard deviation of a given data set. I also remember some tricks when turning data into graphs or tables. We did a lot of work with probabilities and chance as well, but I do not remember much of the formulas or steps to solve these types of problems. Lastly, we did a group project working with a given set of data is which we had to interpret and come up with a proposition. Overall, I do not recall a lot of specifics from the course though.

Equidae is a family in the order Perussidactyla in class mammalia. They include horses, donkeys, zebras, burros, and asses. It also included quagga but they went extinct in 1883. They are in the order perussidactyla becuase they have an odd number of toes the center of weight traveling through the 3rd or middle digit. In this case, those in family Equidae have a single functional toe. The single toe or hoof makes Equidae the most cursorial, or most adapted for running, perussidactyla in the modern age. Equidae are grazers meaning their diet consists of grass and they are hindgut fermentors in order to digest grass. They are also polygnous. A single male stallion controls the access to multiple females. The stallions can get agressive and if another approaches, they can bite and kick with their powerful legs to ward them off. 

Evolutionaryly, horses developed in present day North America, Europe, and Asia. They were small, dog sized animals that lived in forests and had more toes. Over time, as the global climate was changing and north america became more grassland, the horses grew in size and reduced the number of digits to adapt. Eventually, modern horses became extinct in the Americas and were not reintroduced until the Europeans travelled there. 

I took Statistics 240 in the Fall 2017 semester.  I remember that a normal distribution, or bell curve, is a representation of data around a mean.  68% of data falls within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% within two, and 99% within three.  A chi squared test is used to see if two variables are related. The null is that they are not, but if the p value comes to less than 0.05, then we reject the null and say that the variables are related.  Sampling distributions are used to draw conclusions about an entire population based on data taken from a small subset. When this is done, confidence intervals can be made - generally 95% or 99%. For example, a 95% confidence interval would mean that researchers are 95% confident that the true mean of the entire population lies within the range they set.  When probabilities of events occuring are known and we want to know the probability of something happening based on that repeated event, we use p, the population proportion. We can construct a confidence interval for a population proportion using “p hat.” Z scores are used to test how likely an event is to occur. If a z-score gives us a standard deviation that is not near zero (above 3, for example) we can say that we do not believe the event occurred because the probability is so low.  

With the Methods Project of the Writing in Biology Spring 2019 class, I found that when writing a procedure, everything has to be written down. A procedure needs to be written step-by-step as the experiment is conducted so others can get as close to the original results as possible. The interaction I focused on for this project was an interaction between koi fish and the plants around their pond at the Durfree Conservatory on the UMass campus.

Factors in my methods were:

Time of day

Point of entry into the conservatory

The fish as they are moving and living creatures

Temperature

Differences in my original figure (Figure 1) and the replica made by Max Scheller include:

Scale of the fish and plant subject

Color of subject

Figure border size

Arrow type

Photo glare and watermarks

The Methods Project for Writing in Biology is a tool to show how important it is for the scientific community to conduct research with procedures that allow for an experiment to be replicated and achieve the same results. For the methods project, I had to make a figure showing an interaction between two species around the University of Massachusetts campus.

I choose to use Durfree Conservatory as a space to find one. Inside, there is a pond there with koi fish and plants surrounding it. I noticed that the fish sometimes nibble on the plants that either grow in the pond or those that happen to fall in.

Seeing as the building was an enclosed, temperature controlled environment where the plants and the pond are maintains without much outside influence, I thought it would be a perfect area. The subjects of the study were not affected by the outside winter temperature and snow. Also, both the fish and plants are stuck in one easily accessible area. As the conservatory has a glass ceiling, the time of day matters in order to get a photo with sufficient light and the conservatory is only open from 10 am to 4 pm on weekdays. By going late morning, the sun is overhead and gives enough light for the photos to be taken.

One thing I remember from Statistics was two different tests for determining if the error in our data was significantly different of if the difference was due to random chance. The two tests I remembered where the z test and Chi squared the latter of which I have  seen used in many of my classes this semester. I also remember that  tested for statistical significance for the hypothesis of the experiment was the main goal, not necessarily to say this is 100% true. In General as a rule of thumb the number usually used for if we could confirm our hypothesis was statistically confirmed was 95%. For most of our tests we were looking for a P value of less than 5% to confirm that our data was significant. Some terms  I remember from this this class was H0 was used for the null hypothesis, Mu was used for the mean population, and Ha was used for an alternative hypothesis.

    In Japanese culture, there is a famous saying that (when translate) states, “do your best not to bother the people around you”. This causes a huge culture of respect to emerge from this mindset, where the people do their best to keep anything public as clean as possible. This means public bathrooms are always very clean, the streets are kept clean from garbage, and even at the train stations, the people will line up in order to enter the train, and will always wait until everyone leaves the car before entering. The trains and public transport are also all very quiet. If someone were to talk on the phone in the front of the bus, that person could be whispering the conversation and they would still be loud enough that someone in the back can tell someone is saying something at the front. I feel as though America could do it’s part in trying to adopt this mindset, compared to the cultural mindset that we currently have which is more similar to “do whatever’s best for you”. This means littering occurs a lot more often, public bathrooms are not treated with respect, and there’s constantly people running into each other as people are trying to get off public transit. It’s unfortunate people live in such a “greedy” mindset, but that is what occurs when we all are trying to live in a way that is focused on just ourselves.

Another possible experiment our class could perform is a study on when different species flower. April is the month that flowers begin to sprout and flower again, and we can measure the difference between different species at this time. Individuals could find random plants and record the species, color, size, shape, and location of the flower over time. In this way, we can track the level and speed of development of various species. We could also study plants that we grow ourselves. Everyone in the class could grow different flowers, or we could choose a few select species to divide amongst the class. We would subject these plants to varying conditions while growing them, including differences in lighting, temperature, watering, soil, and density of flowers grown in an area. This study could reveal information on the best conditions for flower growth and development and at what point the conditions are not enough to sustain correct flowering.