With this experiment you can proof the existance of chloroplasts in plant cells. Firs you need to put a little bit of anhydrous sodium sulfate(VI) into an Eppendorf tube. Then put a small piece of a soft green leaf on the bottom of the tube and add five drops of Solvent A which consists two parts ethyl ethanoate and three parts propanone. Mush the leaf in the Eppendorf tube with a metal probe and try to extract as much colour as possible. After this you should use a fine brush and and make a small dot with the coloured solvent which should be around 5mm away from one end of the stripe. Let it dry and repeat this. Then take 5cm³ and place it in a vial. Then put the TLC stripe into the vial and wait for a few minutes. The solvent will move up and will carry the green colour to the top of the stripe. We had the task to produce lactose-free milk that even a cat could drink it without getting diarrhea. Cats are lactose intolerant which means that they can't digest normal cow milk. Our task was to breakdown the lactose in the milk and "digest" already the sugar which leaves only glucose and galactose in the milk. You will need: -Lactase enzymes -2% sodium alginate solution -1.5% calcium chloride solution -A tea strainer -Glucose test stripes -A container with a little hose on one side (that something can go through) -A small piece of nylon gaze -A tap -various beakers and syringes First you have to mix 2cm^3 of the lactase enzyme with 8cm^3 of the sodium alginate solution. After this you have to insert the mixture slowly drop-by-drop with a syringe into the calcium chloride solution. The mixture will form small bubbles. You have to wait for a few minutes to set them and let them harden. When they had enough time you have to separate the balls or bubbles from the calcium chloride solution by letting them flow through the tea strainer. Now you but the nylon gaze on the exit of the container and put the balls into it. A fluid can pass now, but the balls can't. With the tap at the hose you can regulate the output of the container. Now you can fill in the milk and test it after that to look, if there is already glucose or still lactose inside. You will have to repeat it several times to get clearer values.
In conclusion I can say that this experiment is not only very good to show catabolism reactions, it shows also a alternative for lactose intolerant people to drink a substitute of milk. The taste doesn't really change and the body doesn't has to react with any pain in the stomach or diarrhea.
Here some impressions of our experiment in class about the denaturing mungbeans.... source: New Scientist
This test was carried out to investigate the behaviour from mice on sweeteners. The mice got feed with glucose for a few weeks. The sweeteners were 20.000 sweeter than sugar. The mice firstly didn't show any special reactions, but after a couple of weeks the showed signs of an glucose intollerancy, known as diabetes. Diabetes is a serious disease which makes it very hard to hold the own sugar level. The big problem of this disease is that you have it a life long. The supervisors of this study , Segal and Elinav, gave one part of the mice a dosis consisted 5% of a main used sweetener and the rest glucose, the rest got water supplemented of glucose. To check the value of the study Segal and Elinav gave the mice an high concentrated sugar drink and took the blood values after it. The result was that the mice with 5% sweetener drinks had very bad Insulin values. These values are comparable with a glucose intollerance. This intollerance can you equate to an type 2 Diabetes. The sweetener industry denies that this can be related to human Glucose intollerance so far. In conclusion I can say that it is safer to take sugar in your tea or coffee if there is no total clear value of sweeteners related to diabetes yet. Read the article on https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872-600-artificial-sweeteners-linked-to-glucose-intolerance/ What is a stem cell ?
A stem cell is a cell which is not specialised so far. These cell can become every cell of our body. This circumstances make them so interesting. The cells can switch genes inside on and off to specialise themselves. Where do I find These cells ? The best way to get these cells is to transplante them from the bones. These stem cells are called hematopoietic stem cells, which produce blood and immune cells. When your own stem cells are maybe damaged because of a chemotherapy or immune system disease you can get implanted new stem cells. You can find this stem cells in the blood, too, but the concentration is quite low. It takes a lot of time to get enough to use them for an implantation. How can I use stem cells ? The answer is very simple: almost everywhere where you have a problem in your body. If you burn yourself you can get a new skin, made from your stem cells. At the moment the skin is only the beginning. Scientists researching the replacement of all organs. A heart transplantation is already possible to do. First of all you have to take an animal heart, clean it from all cells and then just "refill" it with the stem cells of the person with the heart problem. In a couple of years doctors can heal neurodegenerative disease, too. Of course because of stem cells. Just place them in the right part of brain and disease like Parkinson will be a relict of the past. But not only in the world of humans can stem cells get used, for example: if a race horse hurts himself at the legs it normally means the end of ist career, but with stem cells can parts of the body like the tendons get healed. To be honest, this is at the moment still experimental, but in a near future this kind of healing is possible. Another thing that gets tested on animals is the IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1). This kind of therapy helps to repair muscles faster and easier. Muscles like the heart muscle after an heart attack. Example 1: Stargadt's disease The Stargadt's disease is a disease which takes place in the eye. Mutations in the photoreceptor cells change the ability to see the colour red. Instead you see a more yellow colour. This disease cause the almost completly loss of the ability to see, too. It gets only transferred via genes. Even if you aren't blind totally, you have probably now chance to read again in your life. Symptoms are loss of visual acuity, bluriness, blind spots, difficulties to see in dim light and impaired colour vision. So far there is no real healing against this bad idea. Once your infected you will struggle with it until you're dead. The hope here lays on a stem cell therapy. You just remove the hurt photoreceptors and place some stem cells instead and hopefully you will have back your full ability to see. Example 2: Parkinson's disease The Parkinson's disease appears when many of the dopamine-generating cells in the midbrain are dieing. This causes a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system. Usually the ill person starts uncontrolled shaking, slow movements and difficulties with walking. It happens often that the person changes her usual behaviour and seems more grumpy and stays on distance. The only way to slow down this process is as much sport as possible. If you try to work against this foreclosure process, you can win some time. In the future it will hopefully be possible to work against These symptoms with the help of a stem cell therapy. Just remove the dieing cell and the body can heal himself. Are there disadvantages, too ? Yes, of course. the price for example. This stem cell therapies are very expensive. Not everybody will be able to pay it. This means that only the rich part of the population can fight against diseases like Parkinson, dementia, leukemia and other forms of cancer. Another Problem is that the stem cells therapies are at the Moment still very theoretic. In the most cases it is too dangerous to try stem cell therapy. Conclusion: At the end I can only say that it will be a very interesting development and to hear that one time you will be able to print a new heart makes me sleep much better. What is a pseudoscientific claim ?
A pseudoscientific claim is a part of a science which is very theoretical and not really proved. A good example is the homeopathy, which is based on the healing of the body and the placebo effect. Many people try to heal allergies with homeopathy by taking the thing you react on and mix it with water until it contains almost nothing of this thing anymore and than drink it. Why is homeopathy a pseudoscientific claim ? This is good question because you use for some vaccinations some of the bacteria you want to be save of, but you can argue that this whole part of medicine is based on the memory of water which is proved as wrong by well known scientists. The memory of water was a theory of a French scientist, called Jaques Benveniste, who took a bacteria, diluted it with much water until nothing should be there anymore and then he administered a few cells. After tis procedure he tried to infect the mixture with the real virus. The result were uninfected cells. The theory of the memory of water was born. Later some scientists found out that the conditions weren't good enough that the result was wrong. Should homeopathy be available in the NHS ? I think that homeopathy is no real science so why should you acknowledge a "science" which you is just based on the self-healing processes of your body ? For me is homeopathy only a big lie to make money because the sessions of homeopathy cost between 20 and 80 pounds. I think the only acceptable way to use homeopathy is to fight against mental diseases like depression or just to prevent stress, but not to fight against physical diseases like cancer or asthma. On the contrary, I think disease like cancer could get worse if you try to heal them with homeopathy. In conclusion I can say that I am against an availability of homeopathy in the National Health Service because I don't believe in any mythical powers of my own body. Above you can see a picture of all the forms of cancer smoking can cause. It is made from the "Cancer Research UK" and the following article is referenced to their article about how smoking can cause cancer. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/smoking-and-cancer/how-smoking-causes-cancer It is no secret that the most scientists believe that smoking and lung cancer are correlated, but is this true and if, why can you get lung cancer from smoking ? The scientists are sure that smoking and especially children who smoke have a higher risk to get lung or other forms of cancer. The British Medical Journal made a table of their values they got from a research of lung cancer from un total 34,439 male doctors. 2,161 of the died by cancer. 1,801 of them were smokers or former smokers. We can see that there is a factor that causes the high number of deaths in the smoker group. This is why we can be certain that smoking causes cancer and non-smoker have a lower risk to die by cancer. The cancer can grow in your lungs because the ingredients of the cigarette damage the DNA of the cells and make them grow uncontrolled. This happens because the so called oncogene, which contain the programmed death of the cell, get damaged and can't work anymore. The cell doesn't die anymore and divides itself more and more without any regulation. This stadium of the disease is the primary tumour stadium. It means that the cancer is only growing in one part of the body. If the cancer infects another body part it gets called secondary tumour or metastasis. The problem here is that not the cells of the infected body part are growing, the cells of the primary tumour divide themselves in the for these cells foreign body part. It is very important for the doctor to know if the tumour is primary or secondary because every tumour has to be cured differently and it increases the chances to survive the cancer.
In conclusion I can say that smoking definitive relates to lung cancer or ad least increases the risk of getting lung cancer massively. Also is it very important to react as fast as possible when you find out that you have cancer to provide you from secondary tumours. The chances are better than in former times to survive cancer and the technology to cure cancer is improving every Sources: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/ and http://www.bmj.com/company/ We made an experiment in our biology class which proved not only the existence of enzymes in our saliva, it showed at which temperature they can work the fastest and most effective.
You need for this experiment water boilers which heat the water to different temperatures and stay at this special temperature. In our case we took 0°, 20°, 30°, 60° and 80°. Then you need some saliva and the double of starch and put both into test tubes. You also need a clock to stop the time during your experiment Then you put both of the test tubes into one of your water boilers and wait until they have the same temperature like the water. After this you fill them both into the same test tube and wait a little bit until you take the first sample out of the tube and fill it together with iodine solution wich can prove starch. You repeat this until your test tube is empty or your iodine doesn't change the colour anymore. You will see that the colour will change from sample to sample. This is because the enzymes in the saliva digest the starch and break down the molecules through a condensation reaction into glucose. This reaction gets called a catabolism reaction. The percentage of the starch should decrease and the iodine shouldn't change the colour. If it is not the case it is probably the temperature which causes these "anomalies". If it is too cold, the enzymes will move too slow to show a real change in colour, but if it is too hot, the enzymes move too fast and bump into each other and destroy themselves. They are denatured and won't work again. The perfect temperature is our own body temperature (~36°) where the enzymes work the best. Below you can see a Foto of the values of the experiment with 80° (of course there is no changing in colour). |