This lesson presents an overview of the role of genetics, breeding, and reproduction in animal agriculture. Learners will become familiar with fundamentals of genetics, complete a Punnett square, understand phenotypes and genotypes, identify parts of reproductive systems, and discuss breeding systems used in the animal industry. This represents a portion of the Introduction to Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources (AFNR) series in Nebraska middle and high school agricultural education.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"“All happy families look alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. According to Tolstoy, a healthy home is the result of many factors falling into harmonious order, whereas disharmony is what happens when even one of these factors is out of place. A new study confirms the same principle holds true for the communities of microbes that determine oral health. Researchers mapped microbial DNA from healthy individuals and individuals with one of three forms of gum infection: chronic periodontitis, localized aggressive periodontitis, or generalized aggressive periodontitis. While it’s known that all three forms of periodontitis are microbially derived, the microbial makeup that gives rise to each remains unclear. High-throughput whole genome sequencing revealed that, like Tolstoy's unhappy homes, no two individuals with disease were alike..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

UniProt is a high quality, comprehensive protein resource. Next to expert curation, one of the core activities at UniProt is to develop computational methods for the functional annotation of protein sequences. In this webinar, we will be introducing our functional annotation system UniFire that can be used by the community to share and run rule-based automatic annotation systems to add functional information to proteins.

Who is this course for?
No prior knowledge of bioinformatics is required, but an undergraduate level knowledge of biology would be useful.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Outline the types of data available in UniProt
Describe the automatic annotation systems used in UniProt
Describe the UniFire platform for sharing and utilising UniProt’s automatic annotation systems

The Ensembl VEP is a powerful tool that allows you to input a list of genetic variants and determines which genes are affected and how. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to use the online VEP tool, which is suitable for analysing short lists of genetic variants, and the offline tool, which allows you to annotate whole genome variant calls.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is suitable to any clinical or research scientists who are interested in exploring genetic variants and their effect. In this webinar we will use examples from human clinical data but the VEP tool is available for other species too.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Describe the application of VEP
Analyse short lists of genetic variants using VEP
Annotate variation data

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 question, “What Is Life?” today.

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology — ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic — are changing. The course also examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, asks how we might answer Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 question, "What Is Life?", today.

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger's 1944 question, "What Is Life?" today.

This course explores a range of contemporary scholarship oriented to the study of 'cybercultures,' with a focus on research inspired by ethnographic and more broadly anthropological perspectives. Taking anthropology as a resource for cultural critique, the course will be organized through a set of readings chosen to illustrate central topics concerning the cultural and material practices that comprise digital technologies. We'll examine social histories of automata and automation; the trope of the 'cyber' and its origins in the emergence of cybernetics during the last century; cybergeographies and politics; robots, agents and humanlike machines; bioinformatics and artificial life; online sociality and the cyborg imaginary; ubiquitous and mobile computing; ethnographies of research and development; and geeks, gamers and hacktivists. We'll close by considering the implications for all of these topics of emerging reconceptualizations of sociomaterial relations, informed by feminist science and technology studies.

This class has been reorganized to focus primarily on the War in Iraq. As in previous years, the class still examines war in cross-cultural perspective, asking whether war is intrinsic to human nature, what causes war, how particular cultural experiences of war differ, and how war has affected American culture.

Antibiotics save people’s lives...and make bacteria stronger and more likely to kill us.  What is the best practice to balance these conflicting issues? In this problem-based learning module, the students will be evaluating real-life medical situations in conjunction with actual staff at those institutions and offering action plans to be ‘implemented’ there.  In order to accomplish this, the science unit will be interlocking with social studies and a language arts unit that will have them identifying target audiences and sculpting a way to present their findings.  This unit has the potential to be a full problem-based unit as well as highly interdisciplinary--it’s connected to full units in social studies and language arts which stand alone but can be fully integrated if desired.

The pork chops you buy in the supermarket neatly packaged in plastic and styrofoam may look completely sterile, but are, in fact, likely to be contaminated with disease-causing bacteria - and not with just any old bugs, but with hard-to-treat, antibiotic resistant strains. In a recently published study, researchers with the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System bought meat from a wide sampling of chain grocery stores across the country and analyzed the bacteria on the meat. Resistant microbes were found in 81% of ground turkey samples, 69% of pork chops, 55% of ground beef samples, and 39% of chicken parts.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotics are critical treatments for bacterial infections, but antibiotic resistance is a growing problem. Wastewater treatment plants may foster resistance development, since sewage contains both human pathogens and antibiotics or their metabolite. The activated sludge (AS) stage commonly used to treat sewage at these plants is especially microbe-rich and may encourage transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) through reproduction (vertical transfer) or movement of mobile genetic elements (horizontal transfer). To learn more, a recent study profiled ARGs and their neighboring genes at five wastewater treatment plants on three continents. Overall, ARG abundance was lower in AS than in incoming sewage (IN). In addition, ARGs tended to colocalize with plasmids and other mobile genetic elements to a greater extent in IN than AS, indicating decreased horizontal transfer potential..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem worldwide—and in outer space. Spaceflight can promote biofilm formation and antimicrobial resistance development, and astronauts are especially vulnerable to infection due to the unique demands of spaceflight. To support future space travel, it is critical to understand exactly how spaceflight affects microbial diversity and virulence. To learn more, researchers recently used a machine learning algorithm to analyze sequencing data from the Microbial Tracking (MT)-1 mission, which sampled microbes at eight locations on the International Space Station during three flights. The model predicted the presence of hundreds of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the 226 bacterial strains isolated from the flights, including strains of the potentially very pathogenic bacterium Enterobacter bugandensis and the food poisoning-related bacterium Bacillus cereus..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

The lethal poison Ricin (best known as a weapon of bioterrorism), Diphtheria toxin (the causative agent of a highly contagious bacterial disease), and the widely used antibiotic tetracycline have one thing in common: They specifically target the cell's translational apparatus and disrupt protein synthesis.
In this course, we will explore the mechanisms of action of toxins and antibiotics, their roles in everyday medicine, and the emergence and spread of drug resistance. We will also discuss the identification of new drug targets and how we can manipulate the protein synthesis machinery to provide powerful tools for protein engineering and potential new treatments for patients with devastating diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.
This course is one of many Advanced Undergraduate Seminars offered by the Biology Department at MIT. These seminars are tailored for students with an interest in using primary research literature to discuss and learn about current biological research in a highly interactive setting. Many instructors of the Advanced Undergraduate Seminars are postdoctoral scientists with a strong interest in teaching.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an increasingly serious threat to global public health. New resistance mechanisms reduce our ability to treat common infectious diseases. Although microorganisms possessing AMR genes are thought to have emerged from natural habitats, better understanding is needed. A new study sought to examine the consequences of introducing antimicrobials into natural environments. Using lichen – a model for well-defined micro-ecosystems consisting of hundreds of microbial species – researchers evaluated changes in microbial communities following exposure to different antimicrobials. They found that the native lichen microbiome comprises highly diverse and low-abundance intrinsic antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) to cope with antimicrobial pressure. Antimicrobial-specific shifts occurred in the structure and function of the microbiome following 10 days of exposure to antimicrobials..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Background: In modern animal husbandry, breeders pay increasing attention to improving sow nutrition during pregnancy and lactation to favor the health of neonates. Sow milk is a main food for piglets during their first three weeks of life, which is not only a rich repository of essential nutrients and a broad range of bioactive compounds, but also an indispensable source of commensal bacteria. Maternal milk microorganisms are important sources of commensal bacteria for neonatal gut. Bacteria from maternal milk may serve as an additive to confer a health benefit on the composition of the indigenous microbiota of piglets. Methods: The sow milk microbiota was collected using the culturomics methods of Continuous Culture and Interval Sampling, following by the identification of 16S rDNA gene sequences..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

DNA is composed of two strands of nucleotides held together by hydrogen bonding. The strands each run from 5' to 3' and run in antiparallel, or opposite, directions from one another.

Anxiety is a natural part of life and, at normal levels, helps us to function at our best. However, for people with anxiety disorders, anxiety is overwhelming and hard to control. Anxiety disorders develop out of a blend of biological (genetic) and psychological factors that, when combined with stress, may lead to the development of ailments. Primary anxiety-related diagnoses include generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, specific phobia, social anxiety disorder (social phobia), post traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this module, we summarize the main clinical features of each of these disorders and discuss their similarities and differences with everyday experiences of anxiety.

Using the context of apples, students will apply their knowledge of heredity and genetics to distinguish between sexual and asexual reproduction as they explain how new varieties of apples are developed and then propagated to meet consumer demand for a tasty, uniform, consistent product. Photo by Sokmean Nou on Unsplash