Month: September 2016

Mating Game

The most memorable part of the week was the Hardy Weinberg equilibrium “game”. We did an “experiment” in class where we each had two black cards and two red cards representing the dominate and recessive alleles. We would randomly select a card from out “mate” and if we got two red we would be a homogeneous recessive, if we got one black one red we were a heterozygote, and two black we were homogeneous dominate. We would repeat this process for 5 generations. After that we would calculate the p and q frequencies. The first round our class did the experiment perfectly. We had a perfect population. The main idea of this exercise was to demonstrate Big Idea 3, part C which talks about genotypes and how they can affect phenotypes and effect evolution.

I found this unit not too hard to grasp. I understand the main idea of it but all the math and charts made no sense what so ever to me. People were throwing out numbers and things like that and I had no idea what was going on. There are problems, like the ones I didn’t understand, in the packet for this weekend, so I hope if I work through them I will get it. Other than that this was a pretty low key week but the mating game was fun and good way to understand Hardy Weinberg equilibrium.

Anoles

Week 2 of AP bio was again filled with lizards, different types of evolution and reproductive isolation and speciation. After spending about a week on the Anoles lab we finished this week and by the end I understood reproductive isolation and convergent evolution very well. Although I am having a difficult time looking back on Biology freshman year, some things are coming back like natural selection and evolution. Another thing this lab showed me was that I really don’t understand excel. Hopefully that will come with practice but for now I find it very confusing. The virtual lab really takes you through step by step and tries to show you the data and have you experience what the scientists do on a very basic level. It was very cool yet tedious.

Later in the week we learned more about Big Idea 1 (1.c.2) where it talks about how some species are isolated from each other and both evolve and adapt in there new territories and then if re introduced, they will not recognize each other enough to reproduce.  There was a pretty rough quiz on this topic. Something I know about myself is with multiple choice I will over think the questions, and always change my answers last minute and end up getting them wrong. This happened so much last years in History that Mr. Seemueller told me to just never change my answers and go with my gut. During the quiz i thought about this and still changed one of my answers last minute. It turned out to be wrong. This year I hope to have enough knowledge of the subject that I don’t have to second guess myself. Don’t feel like guessing my way through an AP exam.

The quiz however, showed me that there are some things I defiantly don’t understand and that freshman Bio was a long time ago. I am very foggy on bell curves. The quiz question on bell curves through me for a loop. I’m also realizing that I have forgotten almost all biology vocabulary. I hope that knowledge will slowly come back to me as the year goes.

In conclusion excel, vocabulary, multiple choice questions, and looking back on freshman year are the things I need to work on the most. Also, bell curves?

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Standard Deviation / Correlation

 

This was the first week of AP bio and we started off the year learning about standard deviation and correlation of data. We used exell to organize the data and make tables and graphs. The lab we did was called “got lactase?” It was about AMY1 gene copies and the production of proteins and if the number of AMY1 genes correlated with number of proteins produced.  We looked at the data and found the r-values and the best fit lines to see how the data was connected. After we analyzed the data we made the conclusion that yes there was a moderate, positive, linear correlation between number of genes and number of proteins. Another set of data we had was about the difference of high starch and low starch diets and how many gene copies they had. We found that high starch diets had more copies of the gene because a high starch diet requires more enzymes to breakdown the starch. With the starch data we made graphs and we looked at the error lines to see if the data too similar. After we check the error lines we calculated how likely it was that the data was random. We got that there was a 3% chance that data was random so that leaves 97% chance we are correct.

We ended the week beginning to discuss natural selection and evolution.

salivary-amylase-data-key