Drafts

Transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) on the brain was used in attempt to find a way to allow stroke patients to recover their motor skills. Strokes are the leading cause of motor impairments in people. As a person who had a stroke would have to go to physical therapy to regain the motor skills that they had before. Though everyone is different, on average a person would be limited for 8 years or more before they can regain their motor efficiency. TDCS would increase the synaptic plasticity, meaning it changes how the neurons are excited. The neurons would have a lower threshold, meaning that it would require less excitatory signals to send a signal. When comparing stroke patients who went through TDCS and patients who did not, it was found that TDCS did not work as planned. The results showed that the retention of motor skills between the use of TDCS and not were equal. Therefore, TDCS did not improve anything and would be unnecessary as a treatment for stroke patients.

Blood flow matter for individual tissues due to the fact the blood delivers nutrietns and removes waste. When a person is exercising, blood flow increases. Therefore, the delivery of nutrients and removal of waste also increases. The structure of blood vessels consist of three layers: tunica intima, tunica media, and tunica externa. The functional tissue of the tunica intima is endothelim with some elastic tissue in larger vessels. This layer is the internal layer of the vessel. The tunica media is the middle layer and consists of smooth tissue. The tunica externa is the outer layer which is made of mostly collagen. In the systemic system, the order of the vessels from the left ventricle to the right atrium are the aorta, elastic arteries, muscular arteries, arterioles, capillaries, venule, small vien, large viens, and then the vena cava. The capillaries are the smallest of the vessels, where exchange between extracellular space and blood occurs. The exchange occurs through a diffusion down the concentration gradient. 

The rate of a reaction is measured as the change in concentration of product(s) per unit time. For most biological mechanisms, product increases too slowly to be effective. Enzymes are needed, which speed up the reaction rate. In the presence of enzymes, the concentration of products increases fastest at the beginning and then decreases over time as substrates are used. The rate of the reaction eventually levels off and remains constant when the mechanism reaches an equilibrium. Kinetic experiments assess the initial velocity/rate of a reaction because this is when the concentration of subtrates is approximately constant, there are minimal product(s), and the enzyme-substrate complex is most rapidly formed. The initial velocity of a reaction can be found by determining the initial slope of a [products]/time graph. To analyze an enzyme's activity, the initial velocity at different subtrate concentrations is measured, keeping the amount of enzyme constant throughout. The initial velocities of these reactions are plotted against the concentration of subtrate. It can usually be seen that the change in initial velocity increases the fastest at the beginning and levels off as the concentration of subtrate increases. This is because when the concentration of subtrate reaches a certain concentration, the enzymes are saturated, and the reaction is going the fastest it can go. This is known as the maximum velocity. 

From the results of the melting point of the AE1, the identity of the unknown is 2-chlorobenzoic acid. The melting point for this compound was 143 degrees celsius and in the experiment protocol it is 142 degrees celsius. The less than two degree difference reaffirms that it was a pure compound. The percent recovery could be caused by human error. During the extraction and filtration, the solution possibly did not become fully acidic by HCl before being left to cool, which would affect the product’s ability to recrystallize. This reasoning could also apply to the OL1 recovery rate of 77.87%. The percentage could be due to a lack of acidity or it could be caused by the CaCl2 and NaHCO3 being unable to fully separate the compound from the solvent ether. It would affect the amount of solute able to recrystallize and would further affect the recovery rate. The melting point of benzil was 95-96 degrees celsius, which is in the range, therefore the compound is pure. The purified melting point reaffirms that the crystals were successfully purified because the melting point has less than a 2 degree celsius difference. The identity of compound AE1 is 2-chlorobenzoic acid and the identity of the compound in OL1 mixture is benzil.

As part of the the Writing in Biology class of Spring 2019 in University of Massachusetts Amherst I had to create a multi-panel figure that depicted an interspecific interaction that was replicable. The majority of scientific articles include a methods section, this section allows other scientists to replicate the results that were obtained in the original article. The purpose of this project is to help develop the skills needed to write a thorough methods that can be replicated. In this project, the interspecific interaction between a lichen and a maple red tree will be photographed. The interaction that most lichen and trees shared can be classified as commensalism since trees do not derive harm from having lichens perched on their trunks and branches.

Proteins like the Green Fluorescent Protein first isolated from a jellyfish fluoresce when excited by certain wavelengths of light. Fluorescence is different from luminescence or incandescence in that these two light-producing reactions use chemical energy and heat as their respective energy sources for the production of light. Fluorescence is the process of generating light when light is also used as the energy source to power the reaction. This is accomplished through a mechanism called the photoelectric effect in which the absorption of a photon of light causes an electron to jump to a higher energy state. As the photon returns to its ground state, energy is given off in the form of light at a lower energy level than that which was input into the system. 

A cognitive distortion that a person who has panic disorder may experience falls under the idea of "all-or-nothing thinking." All or nothing thinking is when an individual looks at something as all goods or all bads with no in between. People with panic disorder often see themselves as overly nervous or frazzled. When they see themselves this way they go without noticing the times they're calm, cool, and collected. They will either see themselves as a huge success or a huge failure.

Like many genetic disorders, the mechanism that leads to the symptoms associated with different forms of muscular dystrophy is some level of dysfunction within a protein caused by a mutation in the gene that encodes for the associated protein. In the case of muscular dystrophy, the protein culprit is a structural muscle protein called dystrophin. Individuals afflicted with muscular dystrophy do not properly translate this protein and its absence leads to muscle necrosis through young adulthood in boys, almost always leading to a life expectancy below 30. There have been hundreds of confirmed mutations that lead to one of nine varieties of MD, and 1/3 of cases come from novel mutations that were previously unknown. This makes it an especially difficult disease to treat from a gene therapy standpoint as nailing down the precise genetic origin of the disease takes time and once isolated, a specialized approach is required to target each patient's individual case leading to an even larger time and financial investment.