Oops...Happy New Year? A brief summary of the first two weeks back (Day 32-36)

Me the first day back from winter break

Okay so I've been slacking on these posts, but in my defense I've only just gotten out of the winter break slump so you know, I've been out of it.

Day 32

TEST!!! That is all.

Day 33

First day back. Everyone was really tired. Don't really remember most of it to be quite honest. We were assigned a paper to write on about cancer.

Day 34

Cancer Unit! We learned about how cancer is formed, the types of cancer, etc. And then we worked on our paper.

Day 35

More Cancer!

Day 36

Last day of the cancer unit. Our papers were due. My paper was on the psychological effects of children with glioma (brain tumor) and their parents. So I got to comb through more than a hundred pages (I'm not exaggerating) of personal accounts from glioma patients. It was pretty depressing actually, but I got to read about families coming together to pull through the illness their child had and that was very inspiring.

But we're done with the cancer unit now!

Until next time (which will be in approximately half an hour because I've got to post today's blog post as well!)

Extra Credit!

aww!

I probably should have done this a long time ago.

So a while back, in December, this beautiful dog named Sugar had a litter of twelve puppies! I saw the pictures and I automatically thought about genetics.

















Apparently, so did my teacher because now it's an extra credit problem.

Here's the key for the genotypes

BB=black lab, no chocolate
Bb=black lab, chocolate carrier
bb=chocolate lab

Yellow Lab's fur color is controlled by a recessive epistatic gene, which "hides" the dominant dark fur gene.

EE=no yellow
Ee=yellow carrier but looks black or chocolate
ee=yellow Lab


So we can see that the mom is a yellow Lab and from the picture, we can tell that her genotype is eebb because her nose is not black. It's brown.

Since 5 out of 12 puppies were chocolate and 7 out of 12 puppies were black, we know that the father can not carry a recessive gene because then there would be a chance of one of the puppies being a yellow Lab. But the father would have to carry at least one little "b" in order for some of his offspring to be chocolate Labs. Therefore, the father's genotype is EEBb.

Below are Punnett squares with predicted genotypes of the offspring. It splits into half: one half being chocolate and the other half being black. This is close to the actual outcome.

Day 31: It was that day

So when I was in sixth grade, I was low-key obsessed with Twilight. And when I say "low-key", I mean the exact opposite of that. I know, embarrassing right?

Anyways, in that sorry excuse of a book, there is this scene where Bella and Edward are looking at different cells and chatting and naming all the phases of mitosis.

Well, I didn't know that back in sixth grade but I know that now because that's exactly what we did in class today. And the only thing I could think of the entire bloody time was Twilight.

We looked at the different phases of mitosis, trying to find interphase (which is almost every single cell), prophase (which looks exactly like interphase but isn't), metaphase (which looks like the nucleus turned into a spider), anaphase (where the spider looks like it's being surrounded by a bunch of mini worm things), and telophase (where two cells are better than one)

We looked at plant cells (the same kind of plant cell as Twilight….

Lookie!! I see metaphase! and interphase!

And then we looked at animal cells, which to be quite honest, looked like splotches.

It just looks like blob...

One week until Christmas break!! 

Until next time. 

Your Inner Fish Chapter 6 review

What is embryology?

Well, embryos are the little pre-fetus things that grow inside the mom after conception. Wow that was so sophisticated. So embryology is the study of the pre-fetus things! Embryology focuses on the development after fertilization. Turns out, a lot of the embryos look very similar during early stages.

In embryonic development, there are three germ layers: endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm.

The endoderm is the innermost layer and consists of flattened cells and develops the digestive organs such as the stomach, liver, and intestines, and the lungs.

Mesoderm is the middle layer and it develops the muscles, blood system, and skeleton. The layer is formed through a process called gastrulation in the third week of embryonic development.

The exterior layer is called ectoderm and it helps form the nervous system, meaning the spine, brain, and peripheral nerves. It also forms the lining of the mouth, nostrils, anus, sweat glands, hair, and nails.

*Fun fact: ectoderm means "outside skin" in Greek. Those smarty pants!*

DNA control plays a huge role in embryonic development. The DNA control regulates and shows how the the genes operate together.

When everything goes right, you end up with a tiny living thing!

Day 29/30: That's my life, slowly ending/"I'm a Survivor!!"

Day 29

Test day. Ugh. So tired. Need sleep.

Day 30

You guys!! I did so well on the last test. I should stay up until 3am before test days more often! (Hahaha, no. Never again.)

So we got our tests back and the only thing I really screwed up on was the Hardy Weinberg part, but I fixed it so it's all good!

And now, we move onto cytology!

Cytology is the study of cells. (I just looked that up.) And the first thing we did in class was figure out how microscopes worked.

We had two kinds microscopes: the fancy digital kind, and the normal kind. To be quite honest, I liked the normal kind more.

We looked at cheek cells (provided by yours truly) and leaf cells

Cheek cells! Look at all that crap in my mouth!

Plant cells. So nice and in a line and organized. Kind of like a prison cell…oh wait. 

Day 28: Pedigrees!!! And other things...

Bear with me everyone. It's 2 in the morning.

Last class, we were wrapping up our genetics unit by learning about the visual complexity that is the pedigree. And no I'm not talking about the dog food brand.

A pedigree is basically a visual representation of the Punnett Square, except I like the pedigree better!

With pedigrees, you can calculate all the fancy statistics and figure out if the gene/mutation/disease is autosomal or sex-linked, and dominant or recessive.

Here's a fine example of a pedigree

With this graph, you can determine the traits of parents and their offspring really easily.
Aaaand that's basically it. There's a test next class so we all know that I'll be freaking out and being very overdramatic about the entire thing, calm down a bit, and then start up again when I get the test back. I hope it's entertaining for you all.

Until next time.

Day 27: Turkey Day!! (Sort of, not really.)

Hi guys. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Hope you filled yourself up with that turkey tryptophan. I didn't because I'm a vegetarian but who cares!

Since I started writing this on Thanksgiving, I'm going to keep the name "Turkey Day" as the title.

Here's what happened the last class before break.

There was corn involved. Fitting don't you think?

We had to find the genotype and phenotype of multicolored corn, and let me tell you it's a lot harder than it looks.

The corn looked something like this

So we had to count the individual grains and figure out the ratio between the different colored grains.

In other news, we worked on some more genetic problem solving, which as always makes me question why I ever decided that biology is my favorite subject. I've been able to get it, but it's taking a while. Not everything's clicked together yet.

Well, it better start clicking because I've got a test on all this on Friday.

So, until next time.