1. Three main things in BIOL463

Please describe, briefly, the three things that you learned in BIOL463 and that you consider to be the “most important” ones.

 

1. Things are never ever as simple as you hope.

 

2. There are million ways to explain how a certain phenomenon could have occurred; proving a certain one is a completely different matter.

 

3. The human genome has a yielded a massive amount of information at a rate that scientists cannot fully interpret the significance of the data; the limiting factor is not the information available, but the information you understand. Attempting to complete my final project has shown me that my limitations are not what data humans currently lack, but what information I can manage to understand and use to create my hypotheses with, and eventually use to interpret experimental results with.

 

1. Identify types of knowledge

For each of your three “things”, please try to identify what type of knowledge it represents (Factual, Conceptual, Procedural/Skills, Metacognitive).

 

1. Conceptual
2. Conceptual
3. Conceptual

 

1. What makes “things” stand out for you

For each of your three “things”, please indicate what made it stand out for you.

 

They stood out to me because they were not factual knowledge, they were broad overarching facts that influence my line of thinking when considering scientific querries.

 

1. Relevance/use

Please describe, briefly, what you expect each of these three “things” to be useful or relevant for.

 

As stated above, I believe these concepts can optimize my line of thinking when considering scientific querries. These heuristics can optimize my objective assessment of many different system, regardless of whether it is directly relevant to the genome or not.

 

1. Three main things in your undergraduate education

Please describe, briefly, the three things that you learned during your undergraduate education and that you consider to be the “most important” ones. Why do you find them so important?

 

 

1. Knowing things from class doesn’t mean much in the work place; experience in learning new things and skills is the most desirable ability for most real-life employment. This is important for practical reasons, such as finding a job.

 

2. An extreme amount of factual knowledge pertaining to biology, especially to humans. This knowledge is the amalgamation of my education and the justification and validation for me spending more than 5 years of my life spending money to work instead of working to spend money.

 

3. I learned to passively view things from the perspective of an organism. This sounds bizaar, but I find it helps me rationalize and understand why culture and people act the way they do. Believing in god, hating people with different colour or reproductive organs, or making off-hand mean comments are all more easily understood when seen in the light of evolution and natural selection.

 

While I feel 3 is the most important for a greater-than-thou view of the world and helps to understand the situations faced in life, 2 will likely be most beneficial to my longterm.

 

 

Hey, thanks for the course. It was one of the best ones I had.

 

 

 

 

Howdy!

A. Factual knowledge: I have learned much about the specific modifications to DNA and histones that are associated with repression or activation of a given genomic sequence. I have also learned much about X chromosome inactivation, both the known partial-mechanisms by which it occurs, and many of the proposed yet unproven explanations for observations (such as the different proposed models).

B. Well, ultimately everything comes down to what protein proteins are produced where and in what numbers at what time. This is regulated by proteins that associate with the genes in question. By having histone and DNA modifications, the X chromosome inactivation factors are regulated. Xist is regulated by a large number proteins that have their function influenced by these modification, which were themselves induced by other proteins. The system is complex and interconnected and makes you get vertigo thinking about how deep it goes (a good vertigo hahaha)

C.

1. A strategy I used was precursory scan of the abstract then of the entire paper followed by in depth interpretation of previously confusing sections and figures. Just a triage of increasing specificity and depth of the content I studied.

2. I felt the most difficult part was to gauge how well I understood the content of the article. Maybe by my own confirmation bias whenever I grasped a concept I felt it was a significant event and dismissed the un-understood concepts as inconsequential whenever I didn’t fully integrate something fully. I suppose the hardest part is gauge my level of overall understanding because there is no list of “learning objectives” for a scientific article, it is something that must gauged without having your hand held.

3. I felt most confident about the understanding the purpose of experiments when they detailed their protocol and their conclusions from the achieved results. A few sentences can contain a lot of information (especially if it references a figure) and it is gratifying to understand what they are attempting to convey.a

	Three things that stood out	Type of knowledge	What makes these things stand out for you	Evidence/how you would test someone on this (select one “thing” only!)
1	The degree interconnectedness between different genes and many different forms of regulation	Factual/conceptual	Simply that all examples we have looked at are not clear-cut A or B solutions. They have many different explanations with different degrees of influence from many different sources	Have the individual asked whether they can list many different means of regulating a gene’s expression or do a series of knockouts/gain-of-function mutations in a lab setting for the gene of interest.
2	Paternal imprinting	Factual	I always thought that there was little evidence for paternal imprinting and here it is looked at in great detail. I have learned a lot.	Show the individual a genetic situation (a hereditary tree with labeled illnesses) and have them identify the possible explanations for the hereditary pattern, where one of the solutions is paternal imprinting.
3	How much jargon there is recent/modern/current scientific literature and how to navigate it.	Skill/conceptual	This stands out because all past research has been on older topics, the stuff of typical biology lectures where most of our education is based off of experiments/observations done before 2000. These modern papers can have a high learning curve to grasp their content.	Have the individual read and interpret the literature and report on it. Have them identify the key observations and any issues they can identify (identifying issues usually implies deep understanding of processes and methods used)

Howdy!

 

In this class we have reviewed many specific sets of factual knowledge, but what stands out is the information contained in the paper that described the induction of an anterior-posterior axis from just nodal and BMP

Acquiring the factual knowledge of this paper was done by both reading it and then discussing it as a class and as groups in class. The jargon and assumptions of prior developmental knowledge were detrimental, but with all of the above factors contributing I believe it was made clear to me. Figure1, where the different angles/positions of the anterior-posterior were induced by different placements showed the most definitive proof for me. Figure 4d. also showed very compelling results to support that nodal and BMP are the minimum required element to induce the early anterior-posterior axis.

 

The most obvious conceptual knowledge has been shown in our class discussions: how the differential expression of genes is potentially regulated by many different factors in the cell and that systems are not “cut and dry”, they are so complex and interconnected that altering one gene could potentially have tremendous cascading effects elsewhere.

While I have been aware of these relationships in the past, a couple examples in our classes were quite explicit. In the most recent class we discussed how Bicoid and Giant binding-site knockout could cause different effects upon the phenotype. The conclusions was that one of them was a positive regulator and that the other was a negative regulator. I know this is such a simple example as compared to the complete expressions details of most genes, but looking at the data actually confused me until I talked to my group. Once we had figured out the simple 3 figure dataset it seemed so obvious, but initially it was actually a bit confusing. After this, looking at all of the cis-resgulatory regions (SO MANY), it was emphasized that things are not as clear-cut as the Lac-operon!

 

A skill that this class has contributed to developing is presenting. Speaking non-stop and explaining something to an audience in a clear way is something I’ve never been good at. I even get panicky in class when speaking the answer to question out loud and lose my train of thought! hahaha.

By both answering questions in class and giving the speed-dating summary of 3C I feel like I’ve slightly developed the skill. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be truly comfortable, but hopefully I can become adequate enough to get me through the rest of my university presentations!

 

Have a great weekend! See ya midterm Wednesday!

Hello!

A. Factual Knowledge:

I have recently been going over the Appendicular Skeleton in my anatomy 391 course. The information is extremely straight forward but the amount necessary to memorize is the difficulty. We recently went over the clavicle and the scapula which had many different parts on each bone that must be memorized. The scapula had parts such as the acromion, coracoid process, glenoid cavity, lateral border, inferior angle, subscapular fossa, and superior border, to name a few. That is not half of the scapula alone, haha. And there are alot of other bones in the body!

B. Conceptual Knowledge:

In my cultural psychology class we have been discussing cultural influences on an individuals’ feelings and behaviour. We were discussing how men from certain tribes in papua New Guinea will have young boys perform fellatio on them to inherit their source of ‘manliness’. To them this is normal, but my gut reaction was ‘well, that’s rape.” And while I still feel this is a valid analysis of the situation, it was a clear moment where I caught myself thinking in terms of the culture I was raised in.

Regardless of right and wrong in the previous situation, it made me realize that I, aswell as everyone else in the world, are a product of our cultural influences regardless of how objective we may believe ourselves to be. I’ve always partially realized that people are influenced by their environment, but I had never appreciated the concept of how deeply it is ingrained in psyches until then.

C. Procedural Knowledge:

The most recent and significant procedural knowledge I have acquired is from my directed studies course on microscopy. In this course I have learned how to fix, dehydrate, and embed a small specimen in resin. The process of this is at first complicated, but once we actually performed all the different dilutions and steps in the lab with a guiding hand it became much more simple than the procedure papers seemed to imply. The most technical parts are measuring precise weights for the resin mixture and to not getting osmium tetraoxide on your body or even gloves, unless you don’t take carcinogens seriously.