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.