Cher's replacement 2nd blog... April 30, 2010

What We Did Today:
~SNOW DAY
~Practice Unit Test

My Thoughts:

Well the buses were cancelled today, but here I am in biology. Today we did a practice unit test on Mendell genetics. I thought that this was very beneficial as it allowed me to know what position I was in regarding my knowledge of genetics. I think that the test showed us what we needed to further explore before the unit test next week. Even though I could be at home I thought that today's class wasnt so bad. I especially enjoyed jamin to the CKUA tunes. I feel that I am all the more prepared and hope that I can achieve a similar mark on the "real thing".

Above & Beyond:

So on our test it was talking in one question how horns in cows are recessive, but this isnt always neccesary true. In Highland cattle horns are dominant (well I was pretty sure of this anyways), so I checked it out to prove my point. At http://www.nwhca.org/highlands.htm I found out that pretty much every single Highland calf born is born with horns.... just thought this was kind of interesting.

Sarah Milewicz, Blog 3, Tuesday April 20, 2010, 3/3

What we did in Class

• Wrote our Mitosis & Meiosis Unit Exam

Thoughts About the Material

• We just learned about Punnet Squares and they are pretty easy to use when looking for what kind off offspring two certain organisms breed.  I think they're really useful and I thought it was cool that for Mendel's F1 generation for a monohybrid cross there was always a 3:1 ratio for the offspring and for a dihybrid cross it was always 9:3:3:1.  It's interesting that he actually took the time to figure those things out (his life must have been pretty boring). 

Above and Beyond

• In class today (April 22) we learned about lethal alleles and i was wondering how they actually occurred in the first place.  I went the the website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_alleles but i didn't find out why they occurred.  I did find out that most lethal genes are recessive and recessive lethal alleles don't cause death in the heterozygous form because a certain threshold of protein output is maintained. In the homozygous form, the protein output doesn't meet that threshold and because of that, the organism dies.  I found some other examples of lethal alleles and they are cystic fibrosis and brachydactyly.  Cystic fibrosis is referred as the characteristic scarring and cyst formation within the pancreas, which causes progressive disability and often early death.  Brachydactyly literally means "shortening of the fingers and toes."  The shortness is related to the length of other long bones and other parts of the body.

Carrie Kibblewhite, Blog #3, April 19 2010, 3/3

What We Did Today...

- Punnett Squares
- Finished the simple worksheet
- Dihybrid Crosses

Thoughts About The Material...

I think the punnett squares are weird and kind of confusing, just doing the dihybrid crosses for simple genes. That got me wondering how complex a punnett square would be for trying to figure out the phynotype or genotype of a human, because we have so many complex traits, unlike the pea plants that had green or yellow seeds, human have many different characteristics.

Above and Beyond...

I followed this link http://faculty.clintoncc.suny.edu/faculty/Michael.Gregory/files/Bio%20101/Bio%20101%20Lectures/genetics-%20genes/Image1.gif 
and didn't quite find an answer to my question but I did find a picture of what a trihybrid cross would look like, and it seems pretty complicated so it gives you an idea of just how complicated a human punnett square would be.
(I tried posting the picture but my computer wouldn't let me, sorry)

Brock Groenewegen, Post #3, Completed April 19th 2010 for the class of Thursday April 15 2010, 3/3

Review of the Class:

1. Wrote the Meiosis Section/Chapter Test
2. Marked the test

Thoughts about the Material:

            I thought that the meiosis test was a reasonable test, it wasn’t too hard and it wasn’t “drive-a-pencil-in-my-eye” easy. All in all, I found this meiosis process much more interesting than the mitosis section due to the intricacy and variability of meiosis. It is quite mind blowing when you try to understand how a cell can actually know which chromosomes go where and when to perform each action. In the end, I am not going to say I am going to miss working on all that meiosis stuff, but I did learn quite a bit from the stuff we did do. 

Additional Insight

            I did some general research on meiosis nondisjunction, seeing as no intriguing questions emerged from the lack of conversation during the test, and I found some interesting animations about meiotic nondisjunction. They just outline what happens when meiosis goes wrong, but I found them quite to the point and efficient at explaining what happens. Follow the following links to view them:

·      http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/mistakesmeiosis/mistakesmeiosis.swf

·      http://www.biostudio.com/d_%20Meiotic%20Nondisjunction%20Meiosis%20I.htm

·      http://www.medgen.ubc.ca/wrobinson/mosaic/intro/tri_how.htm

Aaron. Third Blog. Fri April,16 3/3

Reveiw of Class:

We have a Meiosis and Mitosis exam on Tues.

We started the next third of Unit 3. Classical Genetics.

Gregor Mendel developed and tested many theories on the inheritance of traits in pea plants.

Thoughts on Material:

It seems right now that idea of the limited amounts of vartiation make it simple to make predictions. The huge variety in humans though adds a whole other dimension to the work. It got me thinking about what traits would we see as dominant in ourselves. It's not as simple as short stem or tall stem but there must be some clear cut yes or no traits in humans.

Above and Beyond:
Brown eyes are dominant over every other colour, so is dark hair. Resistance to poison ivy is dominant, so is curly hair, and unatached ear lobes. It turned out that there were way more traits that could be compared as easily as a tall or short stem. Most of the traits I found were related to facial details, not weather you are tall or short like that. This was found at http://www.blinn.edu/

Meagan F-L, April 13 Blog #3, 3/3

Today in class we:

• Presented our Mitosis and Meiosis Candy Lab to Mr. Challoner
• Were assigned questions from the board, along with a practice question booklet and review questions from the textbook

About the material:

I think it's very convenient and efficient for meiosis to echo mitosis, in that the processes are the exact same.  It's also very sensible and simple, so I'm surprised at how easily things can go wrong. When we learned about the ploidy number in cells, I wondered if there were different animals or types of living creatures that would have different ploidy numbers than humans.

Above and Beyond:

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy, plants, amphibians, reptiles and insects tend to be polyploids more often than animals.  Often within these organisma, they well be tetraploidy.  This means that they have four copies of the chromosomes.  In amphibians that are tetraploidy, they will act as if they are still diploidy.  This is referred to as being amphiploids, which are allopolyploids that act as if they are diploids. 

I would give myself 3/3 because I did the required work for each category (and had to look up and read about lots of big words to understand what exactly it was that I wrote in my "Above and Beyond")

Cher's supposed to third, but really it's only the second blog for the class of April 1, 2010

What We Did Today:
~ Mitosis Quiz
~ Read about abnormal Meiosis (Down Syndrome, Turner Syndrome, Klinefelter Syndrome)
~ Marked Mitosis Quiz

Thoughts About Today:

I thought that today was overall a pretty good class. I thought the quiz was extensive and really helped us students determine whether or not we knew the material, it was not too challenging though. I really liked reading about abnormal meiosis and being able to start to understand why things happen the way they do. It was a pretty slack class since it was the last day before break, but it was really good to go over what we had learned that week in the quiz. Making the quiz and going over the answers also was beneficial because it was fresh in our minds and we could understand our mistakes, etc.

Above And Beyond:

After reading about abnormal meiosis I was curious and wanted to what the chances of that happening was.
The chances of Down Syndrome: 1 in 800-1000 births
info from www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome
The chances of Turner Syndrome: 1 in 2000-2500 births
info from www.labcorp.com/genetics/index.html
The chances of Klinefelter Syndrome: 1 in 750 (male) births
info from www.antenataltesting.info/conditions/klinefelters/klinfelt_faq.html