Biotechnology: Studying Peaches to Improve Biofuel

The Article I read was titled "Peach Genome Offers Insights Into Breeding Strategies for Biofuels Crops" on Sciencedaily.com. In this article, scientists are studying plants such as peaches in order to learn ways to improve crops used to make biofuel. This article affects readers because biofuel is an important product and one that holds a great potential for improving our world. Biofuel is Eco-friendly, meaning it is healthy to the environment because creating it does not use non-renewable resources. Improvements made on this product could mean a great deal to the world. It could slow down or prevent the oncoming threat of global-warming, and could also benefit the economy.

In this article, scientists are looking at ways to modify crops such as poplars and willows in order to benefit the biofuel industry. When dealing with genetic modification of crops, a few problems arise. The problem is that GMO's hold potential unknown risks that could harm human health or the environment. There is concern that GMO's may have unforeseen effects on nontarget organisms.There is also concern of the introduced genes being released from a transgenic crop into closely related weeds through crop–to–weed hybridization.The real question is, do these possible risks outweigh the possible benefits this research could have? I think that the benefits outweigh the risks because our world is in danger due to global warming and anything that can be done to help is extremely important.

This article could be a bit biased because it did not mention any risks this modification of plants could have. This article only mentioned what good the research could bring. This connects to what we are learning in class because in chapter 38 we learned about the benefits and risks of genetically modified crops and plants.

Comprehending Diagrams

The article I read was titled "Psychologists Study the Effects of Diagram Orientation on Comprehension." In this article, it investigated phylogenetic trees and whether the orientation of the phylogenetic tree (how it is drawn) affects how well it is understood by those reading it. A phylogenetic tree is a branching diagram or tree showing the inferred evolutionary relationships.

When I first began reading this article, I wondered why out of any type of diagram they could've used, they chose to use a phylogenetic tree in their experiment. As I read on I soon found the answer. The reason is for an important process they call "tree thinking". The fact that there is a distinctive relationship between taxa
allows you to infer certain biological, physiological, and pharmaceutical commonalities that might be relevant by looking at the tree.The way that tree is perceived by the one reading it affects the overall perception of the data.

During the experiment that was carried out, students were told to examine one of two phylogenetic trees displaying the same information in different orientations and to write down the evolutionary relationships shown by those diagrams. The result was that students who examined the tree with the upward diagonal trunk were less accurate than those who studied the downward diagonal tree.  

A possible problem with this experiment is that some of the students used may have had a better understanding of phylogenetic trees beforehand, thus allowing them to perceive the diagram easier regardless of the tree's orientation. I believe that if both diagrams accurately showed the same information, and the students used in the experiment had the same understanding of phylogenetic trees going into it, then the results should have came out equal.

If it is true that the orientation of a phylogenetic tree has a great effect on how it is perceived, then I think that this information could be used to improve diagrams in textbooks and worksheets, and also improve lessons given to students on how to build a phylogenetic tree. It could also create a standard for how these diagrams must be built to ensure the utmost accuracy.

Evolution Explains Cancer

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. The way it works is by affecting your cells, making them rapidly multiply unchecked during the cell cycle, which causes them to build up into tumors, eventually killing the victim if untreated. What the article "How can Evolutionary Biology Explain why we get Cancer?" focuses on is not how the disease works, but answering questions such as the following:  Why do we get cancer, despite the body's powerful cancer suppression mechanisms? How do evolutionary principles like natural selection, mutation, and genetic drift, work in a cancer ecosystem? How can we use evolutionary theory to minimize the rate of cancers worldwide?

This article is beneficial to read because cancer is a disease affects so many people on a global scale. If the reader does not have cancer themselves, it is highly likely that somebody they know, or a friend of a friend has or has had cancer. This article was interesting because it was a new take on studying cancer. It started by saying that cancer is a "highly complex and evolving ecosystem". Hearing cancer referred to as an ecosystem was something I had never heard of before. It gave cancer a whole new complexity and made me understand that it can not be defined in a single definition. Cancer has many different types, causes, approaches, and outcomes that expand it into something that there is much unknown about.

I didn't know before reading this article that cancer behaves as an ecosystem does. Just as a forest ecosystem depends on trees and their characteristics and interactions with the environment, a cancerous tumor has genetically distinct cells, which depend on cell-to-cell interactions, and also the interactions of tumor itself with the body.

Using this ecosystem theory, scientists could potentially gain a better understanding of how cancer works and evolves.In an ecosystem, overtime populations evolve using mutations, new beneficial adaptations, and the process of survival of the fittest (only the most adapted individuals to their environment survive). One potential way scientists could use this when treating cancer to try to mutate cancer cells, and make it so they are unadapted to the environment of the human body, leading to the elimination of cancer.

A possible issue I found with studying cancer as if it is an ecosystem and studying how ecosystems evolve to better understand the evolution of cancer is that what if cancer truly has a behavior unique to itself? If so, then the predictions taken from an ecosystem could not be applied to predict how cancer will evolve because it would have a method of evolution all its own. There is so much we have yet to learn about cancer, that I think it will be difficult for scientists to predict how it will evolve over time.

Human Evolution Explored

An interesting article from sciencedaily.com was Has Evolution Given Humans Unique Brain Structures. Evolution is the gradual change in the genetic composition of a population over time. In this article it described how humans brains differ from the brains of the rhesus monkey, which the article claims humans evolved from. The article states; "Humans have at least had two functional networks in their cerebral cortex not found in the rhesus monkey. This means that the new brain networks were likely added in the course of evolution from primate ancestor to human."

One problem that I found with this article is that it says humans evolved from monkeys. This is not necessarily true. According to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat02.html, Humans are closely related to monkeys, but did not evolve from them. Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, which scientists estimate lived 5-8 billion years ago. Eventually, this ancestor species split into two separate lineages, one evolving into apes, gorillas, and monkeys and the other into early human ancestors called hominids. Considering that humans did not come evolve from monkeys, this article is no longer very useful. This would disprove the theory that humans acquired unique brain structures through evolution because the data shows human brain structure differing from the rhesus monkey, but if humans did not evolve from the rhesus monkey, than this concludes nothing.

If it is somehow possible that humans did in fact evolve from the rhesus monkey, then this article brings up an interesting point. The human brain may not be homologous to any of the ancestors humans evolved from, meaning that through evolution humans have acquired unique brain structures. If this is possible, it is interesting because this could mean that other species could acquire unique structures through evolution. It could also mean that over a large amount of time new unique structures will emerge through evolution in humans or other species.

Genius Genetics

Fifty years ago, when people pictured the time we live in now, they pictured flying cars, time machines, and jetpacks being everyday items.They imagined that by now, we would have spaceships capable of taking us to other galaxies, and cloning people would be a normal thing. Although our technology has not advanced as far as the spectacular image some people may have expected, the technology we have developed today is mind-blowing. A specific type of technology that has developed to become extremely large and beneficial is Biotechnology pertaining to genetic modification.

Genetic modification has allowed us to be able to do many new things in the science world that improve our lives in many ways. One interesting example of this is the genetic modification of food using genetic engineering. Food can be genetically modified to taste better, look better, be more resistant to pesticides, and even have a longer shelf life. The first genetically modified food, the Flavr Savr tomato was modified to have a longer shelf life. The Flavr Savr tomato had a very large influence on the future production of genetically modified foods because it successfully stayed ripe longer than regular tomatoes, showing that genetically modifying foods did in fact have a positive outcome.

Another example of the positive effects of genetic modification is the ability we have today of diagnosing genetic disorders. The way this is possible is by using PCR and primers corresponding to cloned disease genes, and then sequencing the amplified product to look for the disease-causing mutation. The ability of diagnosing genetic disorders is important because this allows people to know if they have a specific genetic disorder. Another important aspect of genetic modification possible today is gene therapy. Gene therapy is the alteration of an affected individual's genes. Gene therapy is beneficial because it holds the potential for treating disorders that are traceable to a single defective gene.

Not only is genetic modification possible in foods and humans, but also in animals. Scientists are now able to genetically modify animals in order to control their phenotypes. An example of this is the Chihuahua. The Chihuahua was genetically modified through artificial selection. This particular breed of dog is extremely small, ranging from 6-10 inches long. The benefit that genetic modification in animals has is that it allows the owners to choose a dog type that will best fit their lifestyle and home. If the owner lives in an apartment where only small animals are allowed, purchasing a genetically modified Chihuahua would allow them to be able to own a dog.

Genetic modification has already opened so many doors for society today, but the question is, what doors will it open in the future? In the movie Gattaca, some possible uses of genetic modification in the future are shown. One ability shown in this movie is the ability to eliminate genetic disorders in babies. This would be extremely advantageous because it would allow people to know that their child would grow up healthy and strong and eliminate the chance of having life-limiting genetic disorders such as Tay Sachs or Cystic Fibrosis.This idea seems probable because we are heading down that path already starting with gene therapy.

Another idea portrayed in Gattaca was the idea that in the future we will be able to choose the phenotypes of our children. This means that is a couple strongly hoped their child would have blue eyes, red hair, and a tall figure, the zygote could be genetically modified to produce that exact phenotype. This could be a positive thing because it could allow one to choose for their child the phenotype of their liking.This also seems to be a very probable idea because artificial selection is already possible in animals, so it could very well be possible in humans as well.

Genetic modification is an industry that helps many people today, and seems as if it will continue to be beneficial in the future. Today it is used to improve food and crops, animals and pets, and the lives of humans. Genetic modification also holds many opportunities for the future including the elimination of harmful genetic disorders and the possibility of artificial selection in humans. Genetic modification is something that has changed the lives of many and will continue to spread its improvements in the future.