Immune System Quiz

This blog post will be discussing how the Immune system works and why it is very important to humans for survival.  The four questions that will be answered the most in this post are:

1. Provides an immediate nonspecific immune response
2. Activates T and B cells in response to an infection
3. Responds to a later exposure to the same infectious agent
4. Distinguishes self from non-self

So, firstly, our immune system is very important because it is constantly working to protect our body from harmful bacteria.  It does this mainly through a nonspecific immune response.  This is the first line of defense our body has against foreign invaders.  Unlike the adaptive immune system, after warding off an invader the host will not gain immunity or adapt to fight this invader.  This type of immune systems is in plants, but we as vertebrates, have an adaptive immune system as well.  This innate immune system is triggered when there is an infection or foreign bacteria in the body.  In these situation it triggers a chemical reaction telling your body to send white blood cells to this location.  Next, we must look at how and why T and B cells are sent to infected areas and what their purpose is.  B cells produce antibodies that can eliminate bacteria and other dangerous materials.  T cells hunt viruses that have invaded our body.  Both of these cells are activated when their respective purposes are needed.  This activation is brought on by a process initiated with proteins in the circulatory system.  They identify and "paint a target" on foreign invaders.  These targets bring phagocytes that "eat" bacteria until they die.  Often, phagocytes create antigens that attach to receptors to T and B cells in the lymphatic system.  Once these receptors are filled the cells go out to fight the infection or invasion where the bacteria or virus is at.

This whole process helps later infections using a memory in the T and B cells that remembers what the bacteria or invaders were.  This means that if you were to get the same bacteria in your system again at some point, your body would be faster to respond and neutralize the problem.  An important question to ask through all of these processes is, how does our body know what cells are foreign?  Well, quite simply put, your body recognizes it's own cells and your bodies own cells unless mutated or harmful will not set off antibodies.  This is the reason blood types are important and there must be matches for organ transplants.  Your immune system will always attack what is foreign.  Your body can only judge what is foreign however, if it knows what is 'self'.  This happens when you are in the womb.  Over time as you develop in the womb, your body learns what cells to accept.  This is why your antibodies do not destroy cells all the time.  This is a basic overview of how your immune system works.  It is vital in human survival to have a resilient immune system.  Not only does it save our lives from millions of bacteria, it creates cells that know how to handle much more dangerous invaders very quickly.

Leptin Podcast + Transcript

Podcast Link: https://soundcloud.com/robert-stoddard-3/leptin-podcast


Manuscript:

Hello, I am Bob Stoddard and this is a podcast about the
hormone in your body, leptin.  Leptin is a hormone that
tells the body when it is full or had enough to eat.  This
is the opposing hormone to ghrelin; which tells the body
when it is hungry or needs to eat.  When a person has more
ghrelin and not enough leptin in their system they continue
to eat. This is a common cause of obesity. Leptin is mainly
produced in the adipocytes or fat cells. The amount of
leptin your body produces is regulated by the amount of
energy stored in the fat cells.  If the body has enough
energy stored it sends signals via the endocrine system to
the brain.  This creates a negative feedback loop that
reduces your appetite until your body needs more energy.  At
this point leptin production will continue. Leptin is water
soluble so that it can pass through the cell membrane. It
then travels to the brain. The leptin produced activates a
receptor mainly located in the hypothalamus.  When the
receptor is active, you lose appetite until the weight and
energy you gained is expended.

The Yeast Lab

Abstract

For our project, Adam and I, compared the growth of yeast based on the level of sugar placed in prior to growth.  The expected result was that the more sugar we put in the test tubes to make the yeast, the faster it would rise.  So we tested different sugar levels while growing yeast to see if this would hold true.

Introduction

While learning about cell respiration Adam and I were asked to come up with a variable that we could test to find out what directly affects cell respiration.  So using yeast that Mr. Quick provided we wanted to know if amount of sugar would affect what rate the yeast cells grew at.  We then tested 4 different sugar levels to find out their effects.

Hypotheses

We predicted that that the more sugar we put into the test tubes the more it would have to go through cell respiration and it would grow faster.

Materials

Our control was .1 g of sugar while our variables were .5, 1, and 1.5 grams of sugar. We put these in 4 different test tubes along with salt, water and the yeast cells.

Procedure and Conduct

Our procedure was simple, we mixed all of the materials together in order and put them in sealed test tubes connected to syringes.  We then would gently push on the syringes and then let them pop back up.  We did this over and over every five minutes to see how much gas was being produced in the test tubes.

Conclusion

The 1 and 1.5 grams of sugar were higher than the control respectively, but the .5 was above by quite a bit.  There is a couple things that this can be accredited to.  There could have been a problem with the syringes that measured the gas the yeast produced.  Another variable may have been made when the ingredients were being mixed; ie. too much sugar, etc.  So other than the outlier, this lab proved our hypotheses correct that more sugar means more respiration and more growth.

Forensics Quiz

Well in the previous class we looked at a bunch of forensic cases to figure out the cause of death.  Naturally, Adam and I created the chupicabra who went on a killing spree to explain all these deaths.  This case was assigned to us as a quiz.
The answer to this quiz is obviously that the chupicabra saw the man on Thompson Creek Trail and wanted the man dead because he could run faster then him.  So he went into a tree and waited for him to run by. When the man passed the chupicabra fired down hitting him on the first shot.  This shot went through past his left third rib and refracted off of his right 8th rib.  The bullet through all of this passed through his heart and bounced out exploding his stomach.  He died in pain from the acids eating his organs while he bled out.  Three other possibilities are that the bullet hit his lung and he died of oxygen deprivation, the bullet miraculously only it his liver before exiting and he died from blood poisoning, or finally the shrapnel  of the bullet somehow missed all vital organs and he died of internal bleeding.  These three are not possible though, because they are nearly impossible on their own, and the angle of the bullet would not allow them.

Second Week Back

In the second week back from break we continued our research while learning about cancer and our bodies defenses for it.  To see what I did for my paper see previous blog.  This review paper was fairly easy and interesting because it is a lot like what I do in Museum Research, but it is a completely new and to a point, an uncharted topic.  During these classes though, we learned about the tumor suppressor that humans naturally make called p53 that stops cancer cells.  It stops them by either repairing the mutated DNA or deciding that the DNA is irreparable and makes the cell go through apoptosis (cell seppuku).  Unfortunately as we grow older this p53 gene can mutate and or stop producing nearly as much, so the tumors can become rampant.  This is where Chris and I's idea for "solving" cancer came in.  In presentation form we had to explain our original idea (at least feasible) that could cure a victim of cancer.  So our idea was to inject through the bloodstream more coding for p53 so that our bodies can better suppress tumors even at an older age.

First Week Back

In this amazingly fantastic first week of bio, we got assigned a huge project where we must write  an eight page research paper about a specific type of cancer of our choosing.  Due to the fact that I have many smokers in my family, I wanted to do a type of lung cancer, and eventually decided upon small cell lung cancer (Oat Cell Carcinoma).  This paper was more specifically, a review paper, so I decided to review and compare the two treatments of chemotherapy and surgery.  I worked on this paper when I had free time this week and got a good portion of it done by the end of the week.  During the classes of this week we learned about how cancer starts, how tumors form, and the properties of cancer cells.

Doggy Extra Credit

For this extra credit problem we are asked to determine the genotype of the father of these pups based off of the mother and pup's phenotypes.  So first we look at the mom and see that she is yellow and therefore recessive for color (bb) and dominant for melanin production (Mm) or (MM).  Knowing this we must look at the pups and see that some of them come out dominant for color; aka some are black and some are brown (Bb) and (BB).  This means that the father must have had to be homozygous dominant (BB).  This means for the lighter ones there had to be recessive melanin.  In other words there had to be at least one recessive melanin gene from the mom and dad.  Therefore the dad of these pups must be BBMm and the mom is bbMm.