I’m DONE with my functional annotations… YEYYYY. Although….they weren’t that hard. None of my genes had any known functions, and I only had one conserved domain, and that also had an unknown function. Most of my genes were shared with genes in other A cluster phages. One of my genes, Glimmer Gene 13, blasted one to one with a bunch of genes. I just finished the powerpoint for the functional annotation presentation and now I have to do the presentation for in class on Friday.
Well it’s been a while since I last posted something. Lab has been crazy because we are always doing something different. Now it’s crunch time. We have a presentation and a test, and then two weeks later is our final! It’s almost over.. I don’t know if that’s a 
or a 
….
Spring Break was AMAZING. I loved Florida and I got a ton of relax and healing time Healing from what exactly? Well…if you knew me well enough, you’d know..but it was a much needed vacation. Back to the sciences for me! Bio on Monday was fun because we were talking about plants, and I was just thinking about all the amazing plants I saw in the Everglades. It was really cool. However, in Forensics today we talked about DNA analysis and we have learned allll about DNA already in Bio, so it was uber boring. But its good that I know all the material in the chapter because it means less material to study for on the test. Now its back to bio lab
What most people know about the inheritance of eye color is that brown comes from a dominant gene (needing one copy only) and blue from a recessive gene (needing two copies). University of Queensland geneticist Rick Sturm suggests that the genetics are not so clear. “There is no single gene for eye color,” he says, “but the biggest effect is the OCA2 gene.” This gene, which controls the amount of melanin pigment produced, accounts for about 74 percent of the total variation in people’s eye color.
Sturm has recently shown that the OCA2 gene itself is influenced by other genetic components. After gene-typing about 3,000 people, Sturm found that how OCA2 is expressed—and how much pigment a person has—is strongly linked to three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or single letter variations, in a DNA sequence near the OCA2 gene. That suggests a more complicated story than the blue-recessive/brown-dominant model of eye color. “For example, among individuals carrying the SNP sequence “TGT” at all three locations on both copies of the gene, 62 percent were blue-eyed,” says Sturm’s colleague David Duffy. By contrast, only 21 percent of individuals carrying only one TGT copy at each location and 7.5 percent of those lacking the TGT entirely had blue eyes.
Article from
Adair brought up Cytochrome C in class the other day, and my forensic class brought it up, too. Apparently all organisms have Cytochrome C, but there are minute differences, which can differentiate insects in the forensics field. The fact that we all have it, but it differs slightly supports the topic of evolution we are discussing in Bio class. Just a random tidbit of info I found interesting.
So I epically failed my test. Not literally, I just didn’t get the grade I was hoping for, buttttt life is stilll GREAT because I got a 96 on my Forensics test….and I got to move into the new pretty pretty lab
Pictures Included Of Course!
SO yesterday Gbrowse went down! It was devestating!!!! nahhhh, just frustrating because we JUST figured out how to merge annotations in our groups…but we know how to now so that’s good!
And I didn’t do as well on the test as I thought I did… but that test was harder than the final last semester! So I’m still happy!
Ok so I’m not gonna lie… that bio test was über hard, and I focused most of my time on studying for that test, but I also had a forensics test, and I didn’t even read 4 of the 7 chapters covered on the test….and yet I still get everything right..that is so not fair. That would NEVER happen with Bio. It also helped that the forensics test was all free response and not multiple choice. I HATE multiple choice.
and this weather sucks. both days campus closed down were days I was supposed to work. that totally sucks, too. We are about to move into a new lab… and we can’t if we never work! lol..
This morning in my forensic science class we were “learning” about electrophoresis… and how apparently ethidium bromide is soooooo bad. I almost laughed out loud because we used that stuff last semester in lab. It’s interesting how the subjects are starting to mesh together. I’m kinda worried about this test tomorrow, but hopefully I will kick butt!….or at least pass
I just finished annotating my genes, and I feel really confident on the first 4 because they were all Blasting one to one and SF scores were high, and they were all overlapping by four… the last three genes, however, tottttalllly not the case. I did the best I could, but they were really tricky.