Biology Reflections

I recently did some phage work that looks at bacteria that could have evolved defenses against those phages. Luckily, the results came back significant. I tested three different strains of E. Coli, each with its own introduced plasmid system. Then, after laying them out on the agar, I tested to see how well the bacteria defended against the phage. Each dot on the plate represents (from right to left) a dilution of phage concentration. Thus, a clearer clearing of the agar repr

A part of 16s sequencing in microbiology is the computational and analytical aspect that involves a significant amount of coding. Over the past week, I have been learning how to use a different kind of coding script called R. The core R language is primarily built on C, Fortran, and R itself. It was developed by statisticians as an independent, open-source implementation of the older S programming language. There are various tutorials that I've completed that are necessary fo

Prior to Alka Menon's presentation “Trust Issues: AI in Medicine and Modern Life”, we were required to read two articles. They seem completely unrelated. One discusses the infiltration of AI in mental healthcare and the other discusses how we measure public trust in science. However, by reading them one after the other, I have a revelation: both have the same question, albeit from different perspectives: Who is responsible for defining trustworthiness? Mira Vale’s “Building t

I took AP Biology as a course and APES self-taught myself out of a textbook. Therefore, I noticed something about second-time around students that they may have missed – that a large portion of what I was supposed to be learning in APES, I had actually already learned in Bio. More specifically, AP Bio Units 7 & 8 (Natural Selection/ Ecology) are a huge part of APES. The first unit is Unit 8 – Ecology. This unit discusses the flow of energy in trophic levels, which includes th

After the AP Bio exam, our teacher's final assignment was something called an ecological scavenger hunt, wherein we took pictures of various ecological items on our school's property. Then we wrote a sentence explanation for each picture and presented it as a slideshow: I actually really liked this project because it involved a lot of collaboration between classmates. It was also just something really nice to do outside for a change when the weather started getting warmer. I

A personal Synopsys For a class assignment at Brown Precollege, I put together a dramatic synopsis about one of the most infamous viruses in history: the 1918 influenza strain. Scientists recently reconstructed it using reverse genetics, which sounds like something ripped straight from a zombie movie, but the purpose was serious. By rebuilding all eight of the virus’s gene segments, researchers were finally able to test what made the 1918 strain so virulent. Here is the link

The “Spongivirus” Every now and then, a class project produces a virus so weirdly creative you almost want to root for it. The Spongivirus (officially D. spongiae Variant-1) is exactly that. Picture a virus with a sponge-like outer shell full of tiny pores and a yellow protective core inside. It’s basically the kitchen sponge of the microscopic world, just a lot less helpful. This thing runs on RNA, which means it mutates fast and never sits still. Long-term immunity? Not hap