andybody – BioQuakes

The New Source of Mental Illness

On March 8, 2015

a three dimensional recreation of DNA methylation

For years scientists were convinced that the root cause of diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia lay somewhere hidden in the human genome. But the particular genetic sequence that would supposedly be linked to these illnesses remained elusive. So researches turned to the developing theory of Epigenetics. Studies from King’s College in London and related in this article have shown that Epigenetic (changes in gene activity caused by the environment) changes might be responsible for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Jonathan Mill and colleagues scanned the genome of 22 pairs of identical twins. For each pair of twins, one of the twins was diagnosed with either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. With the understanding that chemical methyl groups attached to particular sites on a genome are responsible for the “turning of” and “turning on” of genes, Mill and his team “scanned for differences in the attachment of methyl groups at 27,000 sites in the genome.” The researches found variations in the amount of methylation of up to 20 percent in the gene ST6GALNAC1 (which has been connected with schizophrenia) and differences in the amount of methylation of up to 25% in the gene GPR24 (which had previously been linked to bipolar disorder). Interestingly Mill’s team found that “a gene called ZNF659, showed over methylation in people with schizophrenia and under-methylation in those who were bipolar, suggesting that the conditions might result from opposing gene activity. These findings certainly support the theory of Epigenetic’s being a real factor in behavior and mental illness. They also serve to confirm that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are related disorders. This relates to our unit in the sense that Epigenetics deals with the expression of the DNA and genetic sequence we are learning about. While we read about how the nucleotides are sequenced, Epigenetics could potentially be responsible for how DNA is expressed.

How to stick with your New Years Resolutions

By andybody

On January 17, 2015

In Student Post

In Tracy Cutchlow’s article “How to Trick Yourself into Exercising” she talks about the difficulty of sticking to your new years resolutions. Year after year peoplecreate resolutionsthat involve things such as consistent exercise, but they struggle to actually act on their resolution. So Tracy spoke with a psychologist about possible techniques that would enable her to “trick herself into exercising.” The psychologist’s technique involved a relatively simple three step procedure. The first step is to create a “ridiculously realistic goal.” For example, rather than say you are going to exercise everyday, start off with three days a week. The next step involves accountability. This could mean writing notes in your phone or putting a calendar up on the fridge to remind you about your resolution and to help you keep track of your progress. The final, and most important step, is to create a “painful consequence.” For Tracy this meant that if she ever failed to maintain her three days a week resolution, she would have to give $500 dollars to an organization that she “hates” (Comcast). The purpose of the painful consequence is to essentially make breaking your resolution so unappealing that it eventually becomes a rule. In his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, author Paul Tough describes thegeneral science behind how creating rules for yourself is an effective method for maintaining discipline. He writes, “When you’re making rules for yourself, you’re enlisting the prefrontal cortex as your partner against the more reflexive parts of your brain. … Rules are a metacognitive substitute for willpower. By making yourself a rule (“I never eat fried dumplings”), you can sidestep the painful internal conflict between your desire for fried foods and your willful determination to resist them.” So Tracy Cutchlow’s article provides a means through which we can create rules for ourselves and in turn, successfully adhere to our resolutions.

Image URL: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Exercise_motivation#mediaviewer/File:Cycling_Time_Trial_effort.jpg

A Historiography Cognitive Dissonance

By andybody

On November 18, 2014

In Student Post

In his theory of Cognitive Dissonance, American psychologist Leon Festinger, hypothesizes that humans “cognize and interpret information to fit what they already believe.” In a recent article from nautil.us, Tom Vanderbilt provides the reader with a brief summary and historiography of the various studies related to Festinger’s theory and the idea that “we see what we want to see.”

Since both of my parents are psychologists I figured, “this article should be right in my wheelhouse, right?.” I found the article interesting primarily because Vanderbilt’s collection of studies serve to confirm that our brains have a “mind of their own,” and that it is essentially impossible to observe something truly objectively. One study involving the above ambiguous image of a sort of duck/rabbit hybrid, revealed that children were more likely to see the rabbit on easter sunday, “where on other sundays they were more likely to see the duck.” A similar study, conducted by psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, was based off of the footage from a highly contentious football game. The game was Princeton v. Dartmouth 1951, and after asking students from the respective universities questions such as “Which team do you feel started the rough play,” Hastorf and Cantril, concluded that since the “responses were so biased… the data [indicates] that there is no such thing as a game existing out there in its own right which people merely observe.” The general consensus of the various, interconnected studies that Vanderbilt cites is that “in a world of ambiguity, we see what we want to see:” our environment presents us with an influx of information (too much information for us to process) so the brain simply chooses which bits of information to deal with. In order to efficiently process all the information from our environment, the brain “fill[s] in the details, making sense out of ambiguous sensory input.” So, the research warns us to take what we see with a grain of salt: because our biases alter even our physical, sensory perception of the world.

The Cambrian Explosion: An Evolutionary Arms Race

By andybody

On October 4, 2014

In Student Post

About two weeks ago I dropped in on a freshman Biology class on a college visit. The professor was giving a lecture on something called “The Cambrian Explosion”, something I’d never heard of. He described the “explosion” as an evolutionary arms race, a period in which the evolutionary process; the diversification of organisms accelerated from 0 to 60 in a “relative blink.” Needless to say, the lecture piqued my interest, and so I searched the web for some more insight on the curious “explosion.” I found a great article from the innovative science blog nautil.us by Brooke Borel called “The Greatest Animal War”. Borel’s article gave me a better idea of what the Cambrian Explosion was all about.

Pictured is a Cambrian Age fossil of Anomalocaris canadensis from the Burgess Shale Formation. The fossil preserves the mouthpiece of the organism in great detail, and the mouthpiece itself serves as evidence of useful trait acquired during the Cambrian Explosion.

Above is the grasping claw of the very same Anamolacris canadensis from the Burgess Shale. The claw is just another evolutionary tool used by the organism to predate and survive.

Scientists interpret the earliest fossil records (which date from about 580 million years ago) as evidence that early organisms were small, simple, and… soft. The fossil record shows these early life forms to be defenseless and apparently harmless, lacking the “claws, teeth, limbs, or brains” that are characteristic of competitive, modern organisms (organisms that require these features to survive.) Mysteriously, around roughly 542 million years ago evolution sped up, and so began what Borel describes as a “period of unprecedented one-upmanship.” Organisms developed all sorts of mechanisms from eyes; to spikes in order compete with their rapidly diversifying and evolving contemporaries. According to the nautilus article “most of today’s 30 to 40 animal phyla originated in the Cambrian, and have persisted through time with hundreds of variations on a theme.” Meaning, that the majority of the ancestors of modern organisms all developed in this 54 million year span.

Now where the University Professor and Borel diverged was on the answer to the questions of “what caused this evolutionary arms race? and “Why did it take an extra billion and a half years for the first eukaryotic organisms to arrive?” The professor was reluctant to commit to any theory that attempted to answer those questions, having to repeat the phrase “well, we just can’t know for sure,” in response to questions throughout the lecture. Borel however is more definite in her answer, stating “certainly, the environment around the time of the Cambrian encouraged the explosion as well. Oxygen had accumulated in the oceans after extreme ice ages… with plentiful oxygen, animals could grow large and absorb the air they needed to breathe through their skin.” The lack of a definitive answer as to why the Cambrian Explosion occurred hardly undermines its significance as an unprecedented explosion of diversity that has never been repeated in Earth’s history. The mystery shrouding its roots makes it all the more curious and exciting a topic to read about.

BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Author: andybody

The New Source of Mental Illness

How to stick with your New Years Resolutions

A Historiography Cognitive Dissonance

The Cambrian Explosion: An Evolutionary Arms Race

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