BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Author: samonella

Let’s Talk About Malaria

Let’s Talk About Malaria

A small mosquito landing on a human finger.

 

Did you know, that the World Health Organization estimates that roughly 438,000 people die annually due to Malaria? Well, now you do know that unfortunate fact. But – did you know that the total number of people affected by malaria is only growing? In reality, those don’t matter, what does matter is what we are going to do now to combat the issue and CRISPR/cas9 might be the answer. In order to better understand the issue of Malaria and the resolution of utilizing CRISPR/cas9, let’s take an indepth look at both with the assistance of the article about Gene Editing to end Malaria from Vox.

 

So, what is Malaria? According to the Center for Disease Control, Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite. The four kinds of malaria parasites that infect humans are Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae. Typical symptoms causes people to experience fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Left untreated, they may develop severe complications and die. Basically, Malaria has been affecting the global population for decades.  Now, you might be asking yourself: then, what is CRISPR/cas9? Fantastic Question! According to the National Institute of Health, CRISPR/cas9 is recent biomedical technology phenomenon that is drastically changing the genome editing space. In specifically, CRISPR/cas9, which is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9, has generated a lot of excitement in the scientific community because it is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and more efficient than other existing genome editing methods.

 

So, here is the big question: why does it matter? Here is why it matters. When looking at Anopheles Gambiae Mosquito larvae, a common carrier of the Malaria parasite, in a lab in the United Kingdom, a couple of researchers noticed that all of the larvae had a physical red fluorescent phenotype. Although this doesn’t sound shocking, this is extremely shocking as only one parent had the red fluorescent recessive genotype and the other had the dominant wild type, so the expected offspring would be fifty percent with the red fluorescent gene and fifty percent without the red fluorescent gene, but all of the Mosquitos had the red fluorescent gene. This gene has been linked on Mosquitos to the fertility of female mosquitos. Now, you might be asking yourself: when does CRISPR/cas9 come into play? Well, CRISPR/cas9 can target and locate a specific gene, cut, enter itself in and then passed onto the abundant and constant offspring. As a result, when the CRISPR/cas9 is utilized to alter the mosquito population to be resilient to the Malaria parasite and could “wipe” Malaria from the future history of the planet.

 

In reality, I could never say that this is bad thing as it is working to save lives of hundreds of thousands of people globally. As a matter of fact, I would believe the majority of the population would say this is a good thing, but I am going to say this: do it, but do it right. This is something that needs to be done, Malaria has wreaked havoc on our global community for decades and we must move past that, but any small mistake would halt progress in this field for year. In conclusion, let’s keep having a serious discussion on changing the status of Malaria globally.

 

Thank you!

 

From your favorite bacteria,

SAMonella

 

Would you fuel your car with leaves to end global warming?

 

Leaves are the most abundant product on earth and now can be the answer to end global warming.

 

Speaking on behalf of my family, we cannot agree on anything! Ironically, we have one tradition that we all agree on. On Sunday evenings, we order take-out food and watch 60 Minutes. Typically, episodes contain a couple segments on current global or domestic political issues, but this past week was different. This past week the last segment was about an unlikely inventor. This inventor was a senile 81 year old man that has quoted himself as the messiah that is here on earth to solve global warming although his drivers license says Marshall Medoff. Mr. Medoff , the unlikely inventor asked  himself, “how do I change inedible plant life into transportation fuels?”

 

Toiling without an answer, Mr. Medoff went for a stroll around the Walden Pond in the middle of Fall, noticing the vast quantities of leaves and natural debris that covered the ground. Mr. Medoff realized that if he could gain mass quantities of sugar molecules he could solve this issue! When continuing to walk around the pond, Mr. Medoff realized that if he could extract the cellulose from the cell wall of the abundant leaves and natural debree, that he could change the course of history, forever. One may ask, how does this work? It’s simple! In the most basic terms, electron accelerators fire energy downward towards the biomass, breaking the cellulose away from the cell wall, and generating the biofuel.

 

In reality, I cannot discredit this phenomenal invention as it tackles global warming daily, but we need to take it a step further. This invention will only take roughly thirty to forty percent of the global fossil fuels market and uses only renewable and vastly abundant products. Overarching, this is a phenomenal start, but we as a society are still dependent on fossil fuels, which are depleting quickly. You may ask, SAMonella, What’s next? Personally, I don’t know, but we must continue to invent and create new forms of biofuels and start to become less dependent on fossil fuels. If this trend continues, as a society, we could change the global warming debate for the better! Save the turtles!

 

Thank you!

 

From your favorite bacteria,

SAMonella

 

Food For Thought!

 

A small fence separates densely populated Tijuana, Mexico, right, from the United States in the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector. Construction is underway to extend a secondary fence over the top of this hill and eventually to the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is some food for thought, what defines American Culture? Democracy? Freedom? As a matter of fact, for many immigrants, food is a defining factor of moving to the United States of America. Immigrants are fascinated by the combination of a wide variety and convenience of food. By the same token, the typical “American” diet is loaded with saturated fats, complex sugars and harmful chemicals. According to a recent Study from National Public Radio (N.P.R.), when immigrating to the United States of America, the typical “American” diet causes a completely new gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is the natural bacteria found in the digestive system that assist the body in a wide variety of tasks.

In order for N.P.R. to test this hypothesis, they gathered 500 ethnically Hmong & Karen women, residing in either Thailand or the United States of America. Of these women, they were either a first or second generation immigrant. After recording their findings, N.P.R. moved back to the United States of America, solely. When observing the gut microbiomes of the of caucasian Americans, the researchers concluded that the presence of Bacteroides leads to the decreased function of the gut microbiome. Next, 19 of the 500 women from Thailand moved to the United States of America. After many observation hours and careful logging of food consumed, the gut microbiomes of the immigrants began to diverge from their natural affinity. When reviewing the food logbooks, the scientists/researchers concluded/discovered that the typical “American” diet leads to the disruption of the gut microbiome because of its lack of fiber and over use of sugars.

Although this is not an urgent issue, this is an issue that must be addressed in the near future; this article exploits a greater issue for the United States of America. The United States of America is in desperate need to change its diet, consisting rich in fats and sugars, the population is facing serious medical issues such as obesity, cancer, high blood pressure and more.  This article demonstrates the effects of the typical “American” diet has on the United States of America. The United States of America must work quickly to collaborate with citizens and the private sector in order to make healthy alternatives to food, cheaper and more convenient, in order to mitigate health issues as well as promote preventive medicine.

Thank you!

From your favorite bacteria,

     SAMonella

 

 

 

Singing for Sensorimotor Skills!

Singing for Sensorimotor Skills!

Photo Source: https://pixnio.com/fauna-animals/birds/wildlife-bird-songbird-feather-beak-animal

Picture this: you are laying back on a sunny day in your hammock, reading the world’s finest AP Biology Textbook, when you hear  the iconic tune of a songbird found in nature, not Songbird by Kenny G.  – a picture perfect setting, nonetheless. Honestly, did you know that the tune of the songbird is alluding to animal behavioral patterns of sensorimotor skills? I would hope so! Birds, similarly to humans, gain a plethora of knowledge through experience. For example, as a child mimics a parent in a specific sensorimotor skill, the child eventually becomes more and more capable of performing the task. Similarly as in songbirds; baby songbirds mimic the tune or call of their parents, eventually developing their cognitive sensorimotor skills to perform it themselves; alluding to an organism’s capabilities to perform a “trial-and-error” process to sensorimotor learning. This led to Emory University studying the sensorimotor learning capabilities of birds in relation to their ability to command a suite of knowledge, through the relationship of auditory feedback and sensorimotor development in songbirds, and its correlation to humans.

Sensorimotor skills is the process of receiving sensory message in the form of a input, for example, a message from the brain, and producing a response, for example, your brain sending sensory messages to the sensory receptors dispersed throughout your body, such as those in your arm and fingers, providing it with a “message” to contract and extend as you read this post!  

In order for Emory University to test this hypothesis, miniature headphones were custom-fitted to adult birds and used to provide auditory feedback. The songbirds would hear a specific pitch and mimic the tone, manipulating the sound specifically through a range. Multiple experiments allowed the researchers to record and measure the relationship between the size of a vocal error the bird perceives, and the probability of the brain making a correction of a specific size. This lead Ilya Nemenman to say that, “our findings suggest that an animal knows that even the perfect neural command is not going to result in the right outcome every time”. The birds were attempting to correct their pitch in a broad range of tones, depicting their sensorimotor abilities to quickly decipher a range of variabilities, even though the birds initially had a tone that didn’t match that of the headphones. Nemenman used an example of learning to swing a tennis racquet, leading her to say  “You’re only rarely going to hit the ball in the racket’s exact sweet spot,” she says. “And every day when you pick up the racket to play your swing is going to be a little bit different, because your body is different, the racket and the ball are different, and the environmental conditions are different. So your body needs to remember a whole range of commands, in order to adapt to these different situations and get the ball to go where you want”.

Let me start by saying that my  sister is a Speech Language Pathologist. As a younger brother, I say that I also have a masters degree in Speech Language Pathology as I “took” many of the courses with her. While “studying” with her, I have always been fascinated in the cognitive abilities of the brain to gauge sensorimotor skills quickly, efficiently and productively. The study done by Emory University is quite fascinating to me, as organisms tend to run a “trial-and-error” basis in order to eventually to achieve the goal, but also to gain the “experience” expanding the broader range knowledge. Most interestingly, our sensorimotor skills sometimes will not do something incorrectly, but “tweaks” itself in order to achieve the associated correct “pitch”. Lastly, keep singing for science!

Thank you!

From your favorite bacteria,

          SAMonella

 

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