Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe gel electrophoresisExplain molecular and reproductive cloningDescribe uses of biotechnology in medicine and agriculture

The course applies molecular biology and reverse genetics approaches to the study of apoptosis, or programmed cell death (PCD), in Drosophila cells. RNA interference (RNAi), or double stranded RNA-mediated gene silencing, will be used to inhibit expression of candidate apoptosis-related genes in cultured Drosophila cells. Teams of 2 or 3 students will design and carry out experiments to address questions about the genes involved in the regulation and execution of PCD in this system. Some projects involve the use of DNA damaging agents or other cytotoxic chemicals or drugs to help understand the pathways that control a cell's decision to undergo apoptosis. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication are provided.

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:

"Osteoarthritis is a painful degradation of joint cartilage. Therapies that boost cartilage's limited ability to repair using adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ASCs) have shown promise in cell culture and animal studies, but that success has not carried over to clinical trials. This variability in clinical trials may come down to how the cells are cultured prior to implantation. To test this, a recent study examined a co-culture system combining ASCs taken from the fat pad behind the patella and cartilage cells (chondrocytes). Co-cultured ASCs and chondrocytes had higher expression of cartilage-associated genes than expected, and the effect was larger in cultures with a lower ratio of ASCs to chondrocytes. This gene expression change likely reflects changes in the ASCs and would suggest that the ASCs are starting to make the molecular changes needed to repair damaged cartilage, but increased expression in the chondrocytes, rather than the ASCs, cannot be ruled out without further experiments..."

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