The Molecular Origins of Life!

The Molecular Origins of Life: 1.D.1    1.D.2 Replication Pros: DNA molecule’s primary function is replication and it carries out a variety of chemical reactions required for metabolism DNA encodes info The structure makes it easy to pass info to descendants In order to replicate, DNA needs proteins RNA is the original life molecule It…

Phylogeny Trees

I chose to make a Phylogeny tree on the Cytochrome C protein. But what even is Cytochrome C? Cytochrome c is a highly conserved ~12 kDa protein consisting of a single 104 amino acid peptide with a single heme group. Because of its ever-present nature and sequence homology, cytochrome c has been used as a model protein for molecular…

Genes and Alleles

This week mainly consisted of learning about genes and alleles. There are two alleles in one gene that is located in a certain position on a certain chromosome. There are two types of alleles: Dominant and recessive. One organism can either be homozygous dominant, heterozygous, or homozygous recessive. Here is a simple picture demonstrating the dominant…

Speciation and Natural Selection

This week we finished up the anole lab, learned about speciation and later watched a video about desert mice adapting to their environment. Although the anole lab was pretty tedious, in the end I did learn a few new things. It was interesting to learn that even if the same species of anoles lived on…

More Than a Standard Error

First Lesson of the Week Through this first week and a half of school, I realized that I’m going to be doing a lot of reviewing and remembering from freshmen year biology. I think it will take me a while to get back into the groove of biology-thinking. The first part of this week started…