Model organism

Can we make a cure for genetic disorders with gene therapy? Gene therapy is about controlling an individual's genetic material and scientists have been trying to make the body's normal ability to battle sickness more affectively. The beneficiary's genome can change but will not pass the disorder to the next generation. In this therapy, the parent's egg or sperm cell are changed with the objective of passing the new changes to their offspring. The improvement of a genetic defect, which…

The field site that was observed was one of Cook County’s Forest Preserves called Glenview Woods located in Glenview, Illinois. The weather was sunny with a high of 84°F with clear skies, and low humidity. Glenview Woods is an open woodland area that has the north branch of the Chicago River running through it. The oak-hickory wood’s main plants are small-large trees, shrubs, grasses, sedges, and herbaceous flowers that cover the forest’s floor. It has areas that are paved for exercisers, dog…

Gene therapy is an experimental form of treatment that modify the expression of an individual’s genes or correct abnormal genes by replacing a faulty disease-causing gene with a working version, or by introducing a new gene to cure a condition or modify its effects. For example, diseases such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, and many cancers result from the presence of defective genes. Gene transfer first appeared in 1960s. The first therapeutic use of gene transfer was…

The four forces of evolution are mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection. Mutation is when a change happens during replication of DNA. It is when the copy of the original DNA is not replicated completely correctly. There are multiple types of mutation including substitution, deletion, duplication, insertion, nonsense mutations, missense mutation, frameshift, and repeat expansion. Another force of evolution, gene flow, also called migration is exactly that.…

All animals belong to the supergroup Unikonta. Since these animals are found in almost every environment on earth, it has become possible to study their characteristics and construct evolutionary relationships, noting morphological and molecular similarities and differences. The relationships between the most primitive of animals were determined by the morphological traits of symmetry, tissues, body cavity, embryological development, and molecular evidence. [1] Symmetry and tissues are major…

O. Wilson’s “The Fitness of Human Nature”, lay down the foundation that war is an innate quality, contrasted by Charles Siebert’s “An Elephant Crackup?” where he shows that humans are the only creatures to ignite violence, which is not the case. Organisms in the world are social or unsocial. But where the problem lies is that there are essentially no unsocial animals in the world. From the smallest bee…

Lynchel Brumaire DNA, the genetic code of all organisms, can help in the analysis of the organisms evolutionary history. All organisms, alive and extinct, descended from one creature. As time went on mutations accumulated in the DNA sequence of the progeny. By sequencing the genetic code of an organism in relation to another, their evolutionary history can be placed onto a phylogenetic tree. In this experiment, DNA barcoding was used to to identify a species and place it onto a phylogenetic tree…

stretches of genetic code and edit DNA at precise locations.It also finds breaks in the DNA and either puts it back together with a tiny change, or puts it back together with a piece of donor DNA. It allows scientists to modify genes in living cells and organisms, and also may cure mutations in the future. I think that this technology is and isn’t a good thing to spread around the world. There is more pros to C.R.I.S.P.R.-Cas9 than there is cons. There is many pros to C.R.I.S.P.R.-Cas9. It is…

Lynn Margulis was born March 5th, 1938 into a Jewish family in Chicago. She attended Hyde Park Academy High School where she was seen as a bad student. She attended and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1957. She continued her education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison earning a master's degree in zoology, and her Ph.D in genetics from University of California, Berkeley in 1965. In between her undergraduate and graduate studies she met Carl Sagan and they married soon after.…

Certain bacteria are able evolve over a single lifetime. This antibiotic resistance occurs when the bacteria changes in a way that reduces the drug’s effect on itself. This will allow the bacteria to survive and multiply. A whale’s flipper has a very similar anatomical structure to a bat’s wing. They each have a large bone in the upper arm, two bones in the lower part of the arm, and a smaller collection of bones creating a sort of wrist with fingers. Even those these two species are so…