For Science and Blogging

My first post is up at Seven Deadly Divas.

Don’t worry, I am still working on a discussion on the RNA world theory and stuff, but I will be blogging more science nerdery at the Divas.

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Biological Taxonomy

I went to college twice.

The first time, when I was seventeen was in 1988. Like most people who studied biology, I was taught the five kingdom method of biological classification as proposed by Robert Harding Whittaker in 1969.

The five Kingdoms were:

Monera – cellular organisms that are prokaryotic, that is they had no walled area for their genetic material (they have no nucleus)

Protista – Single Celled eukaryotic organisms or multi-cellular colonies that do not have differentiated tissues. Or, in less jargon, they are single celled organisms that have a walled area for their genetic material (A nucleus) that can live together but do not specialize. (Protists don’t grow up to be policemen or fireman or farmers. Each one of them does all the things)

Plantae – Plants!

Fungi – Fungi (not great at parties, really)

Animalia – Animals

At the time, I remember there was a huge debate over how blue-green algae was classified. Since all living things were classified based on their physical attributes compared to other living things, there were all kinds of odd things. At the time, I found this fascinating as well as frustrating. Biology had a deserved reputation for being somewhat fluid. Classifications could change based on observed criteria, or dissections or a number of other things. Since we compared physical traits, the more we observed the more comparisons we could make.
And then, I dropped out of school and put college out of my mind for fifteen years.

When I started back to school in the early `00s, it was a fairly easy decision to parlay my prior college experience into skipping some basic classes (like basic biology! I spent an entire year dissecting all kinds of things and I was sure I could go without the lingering smell of formaldehyde for an entire school year). It had been about fifteen years, but the basics didn’t change.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I knew I was in trouble the moment I showed up to virology and saw this chart:

What the hell was that and what the hell were Archaea? What was 16s rRNA that was used for determining where something is in the tree?

Now there were three domains:

Bacteria – There were part of Monera before. Prokaryotic organisms with few or none membrane-bound organelles. They have a distinctive break from Archaea in evolution.

Archaea – These were part of Monera before, there were considered rather odd types of bacteria with no nucleus (prokaryotic) and without other membrane-bound organelles. (Organelles, as you might imagine refer to things that might be analogous to organs in your body. Things like Mitochondria ( which produce a source of chemical energy) and Chloroplasts (which plants use to convert sunlight to energy).) By genetic analysis, Archaea are closer to Eukaryotic organisms than Bacteria. Just look at the tree!

Eucaryota – All Eukaryotic organisms got all thrown together. So four of the five Kingdoms I learned about the first time in school (Protista, Plantae, Fungi and Animalia) are all lumped together.

But how do we get here? I still don’t know what 16s rRNA is! I’m getting to that, I promise.

Next, we’ll talk about Carl Woese and rRNA and how he changed how biologists look at everything!

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Genetic Engineering

Either next week or the week after, there will be some talk about this on the Examined Life, but I just had to comment on this:

I read the Human Nature blog on Slate.com regularly.  Since I am no longer in school, I don’t have access to as many scientific journals as I would like and the dude who does the blog does a great job of keeping track of stuff that really interests me.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2008/05/14/little-green-men.aspx

Go read it!  right now. 

Just two years ago, I implanted GFPs into bacteria.  They did it into people.  This is nifty and scary. 

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