Bio 103, Week8, Macromolecules and Life

I have always found mutations interesting because you never know what's going to come of it. It's all random and it can have negative effects or positive effects. I remember doing a project on different disorders in high school and we had to find out what was the cause of the disorders and most of them were caused by a mutation of different chromosomes. It's crazy how something as small as a change in a chromosome can cause a person to have fatal disorders later on in life. I was also wondering how much of a role mutations played in evolution? DO mutations help species to evolve?

It’s amazing to me that with the number of possibilities for genetic defects and disorders that so many people’s genes actually work. Given that it only takes one small change in one tiny base pair for a mutation to occur, and there are so many different reactions that have to happen perfectly, it’s incredible we work at all. I’m really liking learning about all of this. It just reinforces the idea that everything is so random—it seems like so much luck, and how in the world did it all work out? I especially enjoyed the lab on Thursday—but I wonder what it means that when you’re distracted your reaction time is slower. Does it mean you’re using more neurons for something else and so they’re divided and can’t decide what to do?

Like other people have posted above, it stills seems amazing to me that something such as one simple mistake in pairing up adenine to thymine, or cytosine to guanine, can have such awful effects: sickle cell amenia, for example, which we looked at in class.  I wonder how common these mistakes are in the body.  I remember learning in ap biology that there are certain mechanisms that could possible correct for these errors (dna polymerases?).  what makes some errors able to be corrected, but makes others unable to be corrected ?  Could these simple mistakes in matching up nucleotides be the reason for other diseases that we are still learning how to cure?

I was thinking a lot about how something as small as a nucleic acid can have such a vast impact on who we are. It really hit home to me how unlikely the existence of life itself is, let alone the existence of each of us as individuals. We have these tiny nucleotides in us, that link together and form a specific three dimensional shape and all of this was, apparently, randomness ordered by a set of rules. It's kind of maddening that things at such a small scale can effect the human scale so vastly. I mean, it seems strange that people can get debilitating diseases because their guanine, adenine, cytosine and uracil are all bopping around in their cells linking to their dna to replicate it, and then they happen to bump into the dna in such a way that makes their red blood cells sickle shaped, for instance. It just seems a little hollow to me.

I took AP Biology in high school last year and we went into this topic, that of DNA, deeply. Or, at least, we tried to. I'm not sure how much of it I actually absorbed. (We were forced to memorize all of the proteins, ick).

In any case, this time around, once again, the subject seems much more approachable. The fact that we didn't go down into the tiniest details about DNA (DNA polymerase, ligase, blah blah blah) makes it much easier to understand. 

Just one question: is the chance of mutation affected by external sources? (Smoking, drinking, pollution, disease...?) Can something that you put in your body (or are exposed to) affect how your DNA is replicated?

 

this may be a silly question, but...
if macromolecules are organic chemicals that are naturally made and found in living things, then...why do we need to consume more of it (i.e. carbs, protein, lipids/fat) in the food we eat?
do we need to consume more macromolecules in order to produce more within our body? but from looking at the virtual protein synthesis experiment, it seemed like our bodies functioned automatically (in terms of producing protein or whatnot) and randomly.

and speaking of random, if the zipping and unzipping of DNA replication (and passing it on to one's offspring) is random, then what accounts for "better" genes in one sibling than the another sibling? is it pure statistics or luck? b/c if it was really random, then the trend of one sibling having "better" genes would not be as prominent, no?

I really enjoyed the lab this week, but I wish we had more time to explore the differences between one's response time to a hit anywhere in there body. I think most of the groups saw so many different correlations and I wish we could have explored those external factors. We didn't have enough data to come to a real conclusion but I do want to explore the idea that, we are more sensitive in one spot than another. How do we determine that sensitivity to test it in a labatory setting?