Biochemistry - Blog Posts

i hate biochemistry 《•》_《•》 who tf even invented it.. i just wanna have a lil chat...that may or may not end in me murdering someone... they're probably already dead tho right

Here is my old notes on Ubiquitin from biochemistry! Sorry for any misspelling or mistakes in wording!

Metabolism, Glycolysis, Citric Acid Cycle

my life is currently dominated by the letters A, T, C, and G

You're a Female Doctor in 19th century in London:

Noble Doctor aesthetics

Persian Muslim scientists aesthetic

Science Aesthetics

Seeing UV colors is common for butterflies, but in some species, it is a female-only power

So, you may or may not know that many butterflies can actually see in UV light. It is very cool and I'm definitely not jealous that they get extra colors. It's helpful to them because many flowers have UV patterns on them (invisible to us) that let the butterflies know that they're a good source of food. The plants get pollinated and the butterflies get to eat. Everybody wins. This is a simulated version of what butterflies might see when they look at a flower.

Some butterflies, such as the zebra longwing pictured above, only display this trait in females. Because of this, male and female butterflies will tend to visit different types of flowers. But scientists have just recently figured out how this difference came to be, evolutionarily speaking.

Obviously many species have sexually dimorphic traits, some more prominently than others. There are also cases in which one sex develops a trait that is just... less useful than the other, like this case with the UV vision. Almost all butterflies can see in the UV spectrum, so it follows that at some point in the evolutionary line the male zebra longwing butterflies lost that particular ability. There are multiple ways that this sort of thing can happen, and the article covers them briefly, but after sequencing the genome for these butterflies they found that none of those previously seen explanations were the case.

Basically, we already know the gene that causes UV vision in butterflies. It is called the opsin gene. In zebra longtail butterflies, this gene occurs on the chromosome W, which is the female sex chromosome. That means that sometime in history, this gene just jumped from a normal chromosome onto the female-only chromosome, and has locked the male butterflies out of this ability ever since. This is the first time we have seen a gene do a jump like that, and it is pretty cool.

But anyway, appreciate the girlpower of zebra longwing butterflies getting all the UV vision, and take a look at the study! It's free to read, which is really nice to see.

Slime Molds and Intelligence

Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.

This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:

Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.

Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.

Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...

To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.

Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.

One thing I absolutely adore about research papers is when they’re named something really sharp and professional like ‘Pseudomonas sp. Strain 273 Incorporates Organofluorine into the Lipid Bilayer during Growth with Fluorinated Alkanes‘ and then they put a graphical abstract that looks like this

Sometimes I think "I am an expert in this field and all domains it spans over" then in comes Khan Academy to make me feel like it's asking "hey how did you even graduate, you have the math fluency of a 4th grader"

Khan Academy - Keeping our egos in check since 2008

Guess what? Mitochondrial disorder causing mutations of human twinkle helicase are now able to be mapped with the first 3D model made by researchers at the National Institute of Health! Here's my rendition of the heptamer!

I’m trying to learn how to paint so I can make my own website banners and panel icon things.

Update: These are due for a repaint.

Catch me always apologizing for using technical words even when they’re needed because I used to be *that kid* at the doctor’s office

I’m the only person on this floor who doesn’t like coffee, so I have to get my energy to function elsewhere.

Nothing quite like doubting your own legitimacy as a researcher because of one brightly coloured noodle.

Kinda hard to neglect my work when one part of me is guilty and the other is terrified.

Finally logged back onto Tumblr, it’s a licorice candy and thyroid disease kind of night

Sometimes I look at all these aesthetic pages and ask myself if I even belong on the studyblr tag. I say yes, but my desk says probably not.

Snatched a diagnostic chart for parathyroid disorders out of a textbook I couldn’t take home because I don’t trust private libraries and also here’s some possible causes of elevated basophils:

I tried to make two oddly specific warning signs.

May you all reach a point in your career where you can steal a chart off the internet and only draw it halfway then say almost nothing important about it and file it as an “important research note” for later use in a presentation

This is the most simplified I could make it... Here’s a histology “slide” of a human adrenal gland for y’all who “don’t do cells.” (Placement may be a bit inaccurate, cause I stole this from a borrowed notebook.)

Fun fact: I once had someone try to argue with me that the adrenal gland is a “kidney warmer” that does not actually produce hormones, because “it doesn’t look like a real organ.”

I MADE AN ASCORBIC ACID! LOOK AT IT!!!

The shape of this is so awkward to hold when you’re trying to show the whole thing.

Possible causes of calcinosis cutis that may be rare diseases or just something acute (not a complete list, there’s another page not shown)

Revision of some notes on the grapefruit juice effect on drugs, because pulling up a wikipedia page in a room of doctors would be a mistake

Look at that nasty grapefruit too

It is my first time using hex graph paper in a good while so I’m making it a new “chemicals of interest” notebook.

I think it looks passable so far, though sometimes I include the hydrogens because it’s fun to draw on this.