Musings of a BIOL463 Student

A. Factual knowledge

1. Please describe, briefly, one new piece of factual knowledge that you acquired or developed so far in the BIOL463.
   I learned that a morphogen is a diffusible substance (ligand, mRNA, protein) that changes the fate of cells in a concentration dependent manner.

2. Please describe how you know that you have acquired or developed this piece of factual knowledge, and provide some evidence for it.
   I can now identify what a morphogen is when given a scenario. For an example, in the terminal system in Drosophila, active trunk is a morphogen. Trunk is activated by torsolike, protein localized at the terminals of the embryo, which means there will be a gradient of active trunk with a higher concentration at the ends of the embryo and little to none in the middle of the embryo. This gradient of active trunk will allow for asymmetrical development of the embryo.

 B. Conceptual knowledge

1. Please describe, briefly, one new piece of conceptual knowledge that you acquired or developed so far in BIOL463.
   I learned about maternal effect genes are which are genes that are expressed by the mother in her nurse cell and passed on as mRNA to the oocyte. This means for these set of genes, the mother’s genotype will be the offspring’s phenotype.
2. Please describe how you know that you have acquired or developed this piece of conceptual knowledge, and provide some evidence for it.
   I now understand the mechanism for how some flies that are homozygous for a recessive lethal gene can still survive; however, her offspring’s will not survive. I can now apply this knowledge for genetic screening of flies.

 C. Skills

1. Please describe, briefly, one skill that you acquired or developed/are developing so far in BIOL463.
   I am continuing to develop my abilities to develop a novel and interesting research question. This is for the final project of this class and that assignment gave me an opportunity to further develop this skill. In my other classes and in the lab, I rarely get an opportunity to develop a research question I would like to answer. In this class, I can finally exercise this skill so in the future, I will be easier for me in graduate school.

2. Please describe how you know that you have acquired or developed this skill, and provide some evidence for it.
   It took me a very long time to read many articles to come up with my research question for my final project. From the articles, I have to piece together what is already known in the field and find the missing piece that I can use to develop my research question. I was able to find a few articles that were somewhat related; however, direct links were not made. From these articles, I came up with my question to see if there is a true link between the findings of these related paper. Perhaps in the future, it will not take me as long to develop a novel and interesting research question.

D. What is factual knowledge useful for?

1.  Think about a piece of factual knowledge that you developed/acquired. Briefly describe what you think it is useful for.
   I learned that eve has different enhancers that cause it to be expressed in different segments. For an example, there is an enhancer just for the expression in stripe 2 (eve2). This is useful in understanding how the expression of eve results in the pattern seen in the embryo. Then we can apply it to other genes with a similar expression pattern. By knowing these facts, we are able to come up with models on how other things work.