Race for the Double Helix!!!

Last week our Biology class watched a movie about the race to find the structure of DNA. It was a very interesting movie and the main characters in this movie were Watson and Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin. We were to read the Nobel Prize Winning paper from Nature- April 1953 on DNA structure, and now I am going to explain to you some information about what I read.

Sooo, what is so great about this specific structure? What was the big deal of finding it? After the structure was found, it earned a Nobel Prize Award. Before Watson and Crick discovered that DNA was a double helix, people believed it was a triple helix. Watson and Crick realized that the hydrogen bonds connected with the base pairs of the each strand and because
of how base pairs "stack" on top of each other, it was a double helix instead of a triple helix.

The novel feature of the structure is the fact that the two chains of the helix are held together by purine and pyrimidine bases. The planes of the bases are joined together in pairs. The two pairs are adenine (purine) with thymine (pyrimidine) and guanine (purine) with cytosine (pyrimidine). These pairs are included into both strands of the double helix. The sequence of one strand will run opposite of the other strand, and they are phosphate-sugar backbones. The adenine will always be paired with the thymine as well as the guanine and cytosine, so if you know one strand, you will automatically know the other.

*DNA*

Have you ever thought about the discovery of DNA and how it came about? What is the structure of DNA and who discovered it? Well, my friends, that is what I am for. I am going to explain to you what happened in the 1950's with a lil lady named Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin was born in London, England in the year of 1920. She attended one of the few girl schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. When Rosalind was 15, she made up her mind that she wanted to be a scientist, but her father wasn't all for it. He wanted her to be a social worker, but Rosalind was bold enough to go against her father. She ended up earning her doctorate in physical chemistry at Cambridge University in 1945. After receiving her doctorate she spent three years at a laboratory and eventually crossed paths with Maurice Wilkins. Both her and Wilkins were working on DNA, but Wilkins didn't understand Rosalind's role, because usually only the men were allowed into universities and dining areas at this time,so why would this woman even care? Rosalind Franklin was very persistant and didn't care about what other men thought of her. She took incredible x-ray photographs of DNA, and she was very close to figuring out the structure of the DNA as well.

Although, Wilkins showed Watson and Crick one of Rosalind's photographs without her knowing, which led to Watson and Crick figuring out the structure. As soon as the structure of DNA, the double helix, came about, it was immediately thrown into an article, and Franklin's photograph showed as a supporting issue.

So, the question is, did Rosalind gain enough credit for taking this incredible picture? In my opinion, I don't think she did. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received a Nobel Prize Award for this accomplishment, but Rosalind Franklin had already died of cancer. I don't think the men expected anything out of her, because she was a woman, and they didn't want to be showed up by a girl. Although, Rosalind Franklin was a very, very smart woman and I think that she should have been given more credit for her great accomplishments.

*GATTACA*

In our Biology class, we watched a movie called GATTACA, and it is based on a society that is perfect, and there are no exceptions. Everyone has to sign in with their finger print everyday, and sometimes you have to give a urine or blood sample to prove who you are. Then, on a computer moniter it will show your picture and say whether you or "valid" or "in-valid."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/

Can you imagine living in a society where everything and everyone is perfect? There are no weaknesses or misfits, and everyone is physically perfect. What would be the advantages and disadvantages or living in a society like this? Well, I think an advantage would be the fact that there wouldn't be any "bullying" or making fun of others, because everyone would be perfect and there wouldn't be any reasons to make fun of anybody else. Also, you wouldn't have to worry about proving to others that you can fit in, because if you are perfect, then you fit in with everybody else and there is nothing wrong with you. I think there would be many disadvantages to living in a perfect society. Nobody would know how to deal with adversity, because nothing would ever go wrong. Therefore, if something did go wrong, everyone would freak out and not know what to do. Also, there wouldn't be very much individuality, because everyone would have to be themselves all the time and nobody would be able to show their true personalities and have fun.

What would happen if we were able to exclude the eccentric, the different, the misfits, and the weak in our society? Honestly, I think the world would be incredibly boring. Nobody is perfect, and our society is very interesting because we DO have misfits and we have to discover ways to deal with them. Like I said before, if we had no misfits we wouldn't know how to deal with adversity. Things don't go our way sometimes, and we have to learn how to deal with them, and those situations only make us stronger.

http://www.google.com/search?um=1&hl=en&biw=1020&bih=562

Genetic engineering is the scientific alteration of the structure of genetic material in a living organism. I think there are limits that should be put into this. If scientists were to go inside and change genes of babies in the womb and allow there to be no mishaps or weaknesses, then we would have perfect little babies running around everywhere. Although, genetic engineering can be used for the better, but it is always up to the parents of the baby whether they want it done or not. Personally, if I were pregnant, I would want my baby to come out just the way that it was. I understand that genetic engineering can be used to eliminate diseases and physical imperfections, as well. I will admit, if I knew my baby was going to have a deadly disease, I would try and see if they could fix it somehow to try to save it.

LaVa LaMpS!!!

What exactly is a lava lamp? Where did it really come from?? Well, in 1963, a man named Edward Craven-Walker invented the lava lamp. His company was named Crestworth and was based in the United Kingdom. He named the lava lamp 'Astro' and had different versions of it. He presented it at a trade show and an entrepreneur named Adolph Wertheimer bought the rights to manufacture it.

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1&q=edward+craven+walker&aq=0&aqi=g2&aql=&oq=Edward+Crav

The lava lamp is basically made up of a base, a lamp, and a top cap. The base holds a 40 watt light bulb inside a reflecting cone, and that cone rests on a second cone, which holds the light socket and electrical cord. The lamp consists of two fluids- water and a transparent opaque wax that is slightly more dense than the water at room temperature. Although, it is less dense under warmer conditions, causing the wax to float to the top when heated, causing the "lava" to flow through the lamp. When the wax floats to the top of the lamp it's temperature changes again causing it to sink back to the bottom, and the process keeps repeating.

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AvedzBo48ZYs09Us421nE4GbvZx4?p=lava+lamps&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-894

In my biology class, we decided to make our own lava lamps. Even though we didn't use a light bulb and wax, we were able to substitute them with oil and alkaseltzer tablets or salt. We used a regular water bottle filled 1/4 the way of with oil, and we filled the rest with water. Oil is hydrophobic and is more dense than water, which caused it to sink to the bottom of the bottle. We added food coloring as well, which allowed the whole process to be easier to see.

Food coloring is hydrophylic, or "water-loving" causing it to mix with the water. When you add alkaseltzer tablets to your mixture, they react and oxidize the water allowing the water mixed with food coloring to float causing it to bubble and look like a lava lamp!! I tried to use salt for mine instead of alkaseltzer tables, but that didn't seem to work as well, but it was still an awesome experiment!!

BACTERIA!!! Antiseptics vs. Disinfectants

In this lab we collected bacteria from different areas in the school including our hands, toilets, sinks, door handles, keyboards, and lockers. We used petri dishes and divided them into six parts. We used sterile cotton swabs to swipe all of our bacteria, and we dipped it into a different liquid for each area to see which worked the best. We used our hands to swap the skin bacteria. The first trial was dipped in distilled water, and the second was dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is an antibacterial product called an antiseptic, because you can use it on surfaces of living things, such as our skin. We use disinfectants on non-living things. For the third trial on skin, we washed our hands but didn't dry them allowing the cotton swab to collect any bacteria left over on our fingers.

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After we swabbed each bacteria we then streaked our swab onto our petri dish in the appropriate section. After we used the skin bacteria, we proceeded onto surface bacteria. This is where the toilets, sinks, and door handles come in handy. My surface that I used for bacteria was the toilet in the high school girl's lockeroom.

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I used the same two liquids for each trial that I used for my skin, except I also used bleach for my third trial. After I allowed the bacteria to grow for 24 hours in the incubator, the bacteria from the toilet using the distilled water had grown the most. The alcohol and bleach evidently was able to kill some of the bacteria, but the water did not. Therefore, I believe the disinfectants worked better than the antiseptic.

NOVA Bacteria Talk

This article is all about the communciation between different kinds of bacteria and how they react with eachother. It explains how you can find bacteria anywhere and everywhere, but not all of them are bad. Bonnie Bassler did a lab with her students about how bacteria cells can communicate with eachother and organize themselves into groups and function with eachother. This process of how they communicate and function is called quorum sensing. The article explains how bacteria are all just one cell and have one piece of DNA inside of them, and they reproduce by pinching themselves in half and making an exact replica of themselves.

When bacteria grows, they release a small amount of chemicals. With more cells growing, there is more of this molecule. When the auto-inducer molecule is at significant concentration, they start grabbing on to this molecule. These molecules have receptors that allow other molecules to know that there are a lot of other cells in that same area. This allows all the cells to change their behavior and act the same. In their lab, they worked with a marine bacterium named Vibrio harveyi, after E. Newton Harvey. It is a bacterium from the ocean, and it makes bioluminescence. Bacteria is able to grow because they make enzymes that produce photons of beautiful blue light. You don't have to go very far down into the ocean before it turns pitch black, so it is very important for these bacteria to either make their own light or use someone elses'. Bonnie Bassler and this lab has allowed the world to see bacteria in a different way and realize that it communicates and functions in a certain way. Bassler explains that bacteria is now known to be multilingual and different species of bacteria have a different language to communicate with. She states that one species still can't understand the private languages of other species. But they can all understand the trade language. We now know that there is this tremendous move in the quorum-sensing field trying to develop a whole new kind of antibiotics which is based on anti-quorum sensing strategies. Bonnie says that her dream is to create an anti-quorum sensing drug in order to help people.

So what exactly is quorum sensing?

Quorum sensing is a brand new branch of microbiology that was discovered by Bonnie Bassler. It is just a fancy way of saying how bacteria communicates with eachother. They produce and release chemical signals that are called autoinducers. The job of these autoinducers is to find other bacteria in the same area from the same species. This process is called cell-to-cell communication, and this allows cells to work and function together. This discovery is incredibly important, because scientists will now be able to study it in detail and  work on new drugs that can fight away bacterial diseases.

Kwashiorkor...say whaaat???

Kwashiorkor is an acute form of childhood protein-energy malnutrition. Kwashiorkor occurs most commonly in areas of limited food supply,famine, and low levels of education, which can also lead to inadequate knowledge of proper diet. Some symptoms of this include fatigue, irritability, and lethargy. Another symptom is an unusually large belly. Increasing the calorie and protein intake will correct kwashiorkor, but that is only if treatment hasn't been started too late. Although, the full height and growth potential of the person will never be achieved in mainly just the children who have had this condition.

Most people think when they are overweight it would be smart to cut the carbohydrates from their diet. Wrong. Your body needs carbs, fats, and proteins in order to be healthy. Carbohydrates and their derivatives play major roles in the working process of the immune system, fertilization, pathogenesis, blood clotting, and development. Carbs are also the most common source of energy in living things.

Have you ever thought about the fact that too much protein can affect your body? The reason for this is because a diet in which protein makes up more than 30% of your calorie intake causes a buildup of toxic ketones. These diets can put your kidneys into overdrive in order to flush these ketones from your body. As your kidneys rid your body of these toxic ketones, you can lose a significant amount of water, which puts you at risk of dehydration. You will most likely dehydrate if you exercise heavily and are in this condition.

This article contains a lot of information and I have learned a lot while researching about kwashiorkor, and also different things that are unhealthy for you with certain diets. I hope you take my information into consideration and remember to check your diet before you start, because you never know when something can go wrong.