Epigenetics is a study of heritable changes in a gene's expression. Whether the DNA's show changes in phenotype but not in genotype. Epigenetic changes are often natural and occurs frequently however, there are factors that influence changes or enhances the changes such as age, lifestyles and diseases. Environmental factors are being investigated for certain diseases and how it could affect the genes of an individual to where they pass on this particular 'bad gene' on to their babies. Environmental factors such as sunlight would affect the genes of individuals so they have increased risk for developing Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. Potentially conducting experiments and interviewed the groups of individuals being exposed to different hours of sunlight and reporting if there were flares from the disease. This project was done individually to research and study on a genetic or environmentally influenced disease. In my case, I researched on Lupus, specially on Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and show how external factors like sunlight could influences the risk for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. I also designed an experiment to potentially test my hypothesis that "Sunlight will have an effect on Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and cause the flares to show up". I learned not just the contents from the research, but, how to design experiments and conduct further links to real life situations. It promotes us to understand the issue and problems that people go through, it raises awareness and allows the researcher (me) to become concerned and be responsible for the community. Also, throughout the researching process I used technology in a useful way to state my own idea and clarify them.
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Evolution has had a big affect on organisms and our Earth. Earth changed during each period and we investigated the changes throughout each period or era that Earth went through such as mass extinctions and environmental conditions changes. Our Project for quarter 3 is to create an evolution timeline. We created our own organism and made it so that the organism fit the environmental conditions during the time period. While our organism was in the Cambrian period, it lived in the waters so their skin color was blue to camouflage with the environment, so that it avoids predation. We started investigating millions of years before 'Earth', during the Hadean period until the Ice Ages. We needed to create a story about evolutionary concepts to fit with our organisms characteristics such as sexual selection, natural selection, bottleneck effect and the founder effect. This project did not require only knowledge but also artistic skills because we had to draw our own organism and its evolutionary changes, which meant that there were 12 organisms to draw, showing a transition between periods. This was a fun project to do, to learn about the evolutionary concepts and to express our artistic and creative ideas as well.
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TeacherMr. Andrew Filipczak Archives |