Blog 16 Time Love Memory Write about your lit circle in a separate entry. What has surprise you the most so far?

     "Time, Love, Memory" by Jonathan Weiner is about Seymour Benzer, a professor at the Cal Tech, and a major contributor to the growing feild of genetics and molecular biology. I was really suprised and pleased that he was so close to where we live because I haven't heard of many influential people around Alhambra. The book deals with time, love, and memory of their experiment on fruit flies to see how genes affect behavior. Time is evolution, love is mating, and memory is genetics.
     The book goes through how Benzer got interested in fruit flies. He got the fruit flies from another professor at Cal Tech when he was walking the halls. He put one fruit fly in two connecting tubes and shined a light at one end of the tube. I thought that Benzer was really innovative to think of this experiment, he could have used another kind of animal but the fruit fly was really the best choice because they reproduce so quickly.
     One part of the book that was stuck with me was the part about the eyes of a frog. The experiment was to cut open the head and reattach the optical nerve to the other so the left was on the right and vise versa. It was fascinating to read that there was practically no change at all except that the frog didn't recognize a fly and didn't attempt to eat it at all. I was disgusted yet intrigued about the experiments on the animals brains.
In the second half of the book Benzer loses interest in studying the genetic origin of behavior which makes sense becuase if someone spends to much time doing one thing all their life, they would eventually drift away.     
     Overall, Jonathan Weiner wrote an excellent book that kept my attention on the field of genetics with its unexpected descrpition of experiments on disecting animals and reattaching parts together. I'm really glad that I got to read this book.

Blog 17 Plant Division Examples Put a description of each major plant division in your blog. Put a representative picture for each.

Bryophytes are mosses which are non- vascular plants that can't transport fluids through their bodies. They rely on surrounding moisture to do this for them. They are mostly found in forested areas as a foundation for plant growth. Mosses, liverworts,and hornworts reproduce by spores, never have flowers, and can be found growing on the ground, on rocks, and on other plants.

Pteridophytes are ferns that have a vascular system that can help transport water through the body unlike the moss. They reproduce from spores and have about 12,000 species form the main phylum ferm. The other phylas are horsetails, club mosses, and whisk ferns.

Gymnosperms reproduce from seeds that are not covered by an ovary. The seed is produced inside a pine cone. The trees and shurbs have no flowers but are needle-like and scale-like. There are about 600 species.

Angiosperms grow seeds inside an ovary which is in a flower. After it fertilizes the flower falls off and the ovary becomes grows to a fruit.

Blog 14 Cell Diversity Wordle

Viruses is a particle made of nucleic acid, protein, and lipids that cn replicate by infecting living cells. Viruses use host cells to reproduce but can only infect a limited range of host cells called their host range. Viruses use a lock-and-key method, it fits between proteins on the outside of the virus and specific receptor molecules on the surface of cells. A phage is a virus that secifically infects bacteria, which is also called a bacteriophage. There are two different transmissions: horizontal is when a pathogen is passed from one living organism to another through bodily fluids, vertical is the spread of a disease from mother to newborn. Bacteria are microorganisms that are neither plant or animal. Transduction is a DNA transfer process when phages carry bacterial genes from a host to another. Transformation is the conversion of a normal animal cell to a cancerous cell. A viroid is a plant pathogen composed of molecules of naked circular RNA several hundred nucleotides long.

Blog 11 Cell Poem

Cell Wall
As a protector of plant fungi algae
and archaea, I know what goes in and out
I protect, filter, and support the cell
In plants there are two of me
the second wall is thick and full of cellulose
to increase rigidity
I make sure cells don't explode of too much
water, too bad animal and protozoa cells don't have me. =/

source: http://biology.unm.edu/ccouncil/Biology_124/Images/cellwall.jpeg

Blog 10 Describe 3 beneficial bacteria include pictures.

Probiotics are live microorganisms that when given an adequate amount of, benefit the health of the host. Some of these beneficial bacterial are:

Lactobacillus which reduces diarrhea and helps people injest dairy products easily. It also fights disease-causing bacteria and regulates the immune system and help prevent colon cancer. There are three different kinds of lactobacillus: Rhamnosus, Casei, and Acidophilus. Casei helps promote growth of other bebficial bacterialand decreases tumor recurrence in adult bladder of cancer patients following resection. Acidophilus absorbs nurtients, reduces lactose intolerance, and decreases allergic responses.

Saccharomyces Boulardii is a strain of yeast that helps control diarrhea, and to treat a condition after an upset of balance of intestinal microorganisms.

Bifidobacterium Bifidum, a bacteria that resides in the colon to help control the growth of pathogen bacteria (a bacteria that causes bacterial infection). It stregthens the immune system and helps with digestion.

Source:http://www.livestrong.com/article/147870-good-types-of-bacteria/

Cellular Metabolism Wordle

Metabolism is the totality of an organism's chemical reactions consisting of catabolic and anabolic pathways. Metabolic pathways are a series of chemical reactions that are catabolic and anabolic.Catabolic pathways releases energy by breaking down complex molecules to simpler compunds. Anabolic pathways do the opposite, it makes complex molecules from simpler compounds. There are two laws to thermodynamics: 1) energy conservation, it cannot be created or destroyed, it can be transferred and transformed 2)there are restraints of the direction of heat transfer and efficiencies of heat. In metabolic reactions coenzymes are important as vitamins. Free energy can perform work when temperature and pressure are constant throughout the system.

Blog 9 Find exemplars of each phyla of protozoa. Get their picture and label them. Also describe their differences and unique structures.

Sporozoas are the only animal like protist can't move on their own at all, but they are moved by the current of the blood in their hosts. They reproduce sexually in one host then aswxually in the second. Sporozoas are parasites that have special organelles that invades host cells. To defend itself, they get inside a red blood cell that protects it from antibiotics of the host. They can also cause malaria.

Ciliates moves foward in a corkscrew motion and can reverse when it meets an undesirable condition, it moves rapidly by the wavelike beats of many cilia. Ciliates can reproduce sexually when two individual ciliates join at the oral grooves and exchange portions of micronuclei and each individual divides. The oral groove is where food is swept in by cilia. They eat othe protozoans, bacteria, and algae. There is a layer of tiny carrot shaped bodies called trichocysts, which discharges a long sticky thread as defense.

Flagellates are unicellular and get nutrients by eating other organisms or absorbing food molecules through cell membranes. They move by the use of flagella.

Blog 8 Compare a bacteria to a virus to a prion to a protist.

Bacteria are living things. they replicate their DNA in both directions from a single point of origin. It's main process of reproduction is asexual by binary fission. Binary fission results in a population with all identical genes. When reproducing asexually mutations may occur spontaneously but are rare. Bacteria reproduces by the millions.

source: http://www.ou.edu/class/pheidole/General%20Bacteria.jpg


Viruses are parasites that only live inside a host. In the host the virus translates and transcribes proteins it needs to make new viruses. It forms thousands of new viruses and the host cell is destroyed. The virus consists of DNA or RNA enclosed in a protein coat called a capsid. The host range of a virus is the range of organisms that a virus can attack.

source: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/virus.gif


Prions are infectious proteins which appear in the brain and causes disease in the brain. Prions are infectious and have been known to cause brains diseases such as: mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease. Prions are slow- acting agents meaning its symptoms don't appear until years. Prions are also basically indestructible, they are not destroyed or deactivated. There is no known cure for prion diseases so they are fatal.

source: http://www.nicerweb.com/bio1903/Locked/media/ch18/18_13PrionPropagation_L.jpg


Protists are a diverse group including organisms that vary in size to structure. All are eukaryotes and do not fit in the fungi or plant kingdoms. They consist of single and primitive multicelled organisms including heterotrophs and autotrophs. Some carry out conjunction, which is a primitive form of sexual reproduction. Some may carry diseases such as malaria.

source: http://www.biologycorner.com/resources/paramecium.gif

Blog 7 Describe what happens in bacterial transformation and transduction.

Bacterial transformation is the alteration of a bacterial cell's genotype and phenotype by the uptake of naked, foreign DNA from the surrounding environment. Small pieces of extracellular DNA are taken up by a living bacterium leading to a a stable change in the recipient cell. This process was thought to be rare. Now they've learned that many bacteria contains cell surface proteins that recognize and transport DNA from related species into the cell which then incorporates the foreign DNA into the genome.

source: http://schoolworkhelper.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/transformation.jpg


Transduction is when phages carry bacterial genes from one host cell to another as a result of aberrations in the phage reproductive cycle. General transduction moves random pieces of bacterial DNA as the phage lyses one cell and infects another during the lytic cycle. Some of the DNA can replace the homologous region of the recipient cell's chromosome only if a crossover takes place at both ends of the piece.

source: http://bytesizebio.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/generalized-transduction.jpg