"Normally, an animal gets half its DNA from its mother and half from its father. But Dolly had three mothers: one mother gave Dolly her DNA; one supplied an egg; and the third, her surrogate mother, gave birth to her. Dolly is an identical twin of the mother who gave her her DNA. But Dolly is six years younger."This kid-friendly Web page helps kids understand how and why Dolly was cloned, and understand the potential benefits of cloning as well as the controversy it raises.

Allele frequencies in populations and how they differ from genotype frequencies. Created by Sal Khan.

This annotated slideshow adapted from KET's Electronic Field Trip to the Forest illustrates how blight decimated the American chestnut tree and the methods scientists use to identify and pollinate the remaining trees to create blight-resistant trees.

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.

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 eBook “Applications of Plant Pathology in Genebank Collections” was developed in part by USDA-ARS and by grant 2020-70003-30930 from the USDA-NIFA-Higher Education Challenge Grant Program. Additional chapters will be added to this eBook when they are available. This eBook contains chapters that can be accessed in any order. Click on “Contents” in the upper left corner and then expand “Main Body” to access chapter titles; scrolling may be necessary to view all chapter titles. Chapters can also be navigated by using arrows at the bottom of each page. Each chapter has text, video and/or interactive content on a single page.

Using the Hardy-Weinberg equation to calculate allele and genotype frequencies. Created by Sal Khan.

Students construct paper recombinant plasmids to simulate the methods genetic engineers use to create modified bacteria. They learn what role enzymes, DNA and genes play in the modification of organisms. For the particular model they work on, they isolate a mammal insulin gene and combine it with a bacteria's gene sequence (plasmid DNA) for production of the protein insulin.

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:

"Two mosquito species in America have been engaged in a battle for dominance for the past 30 years: the native Aedes aegypti and the invasive Aedes albopictus -- also known as the Asian tiger mosquito The tiger mosquito has a distinct competitive advantage Male Aedes albopictus are really good at wooing female Aedes aegypti The resultant interspecies mating permanently sterilizes the female, effectively ending her reproductive future But Aedes aegypti are evolving the ability to resist the advances of Aedes albopictus Although this is good news for Aedes aegypti the outlook is darker for humans, as Aedes aegypti are key transmitters of diseases like Zika and dengue fever Researchers have now started to uncover the genetic changes tied to this resistance Uncovering the molecular correlates governing mosquito mating preferences could lead to better control strategies and might help prevent future outbreaks of disease Burford Reiskind, et al..."

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

Students toss coins to determine what traits a set of mouse parents possess, such as fur color, body size, heat tolerance, and running speed. Then they use coin tossing to determine the traits a mouse pup born to these parents possesses. Then they compare these physical features to features that would be most adaptive in several different environmental conditions. Finally, students consider what would happen to the mouse offspring if those environmental conditions were to change: which mice would be most likely to survive and produce the next generation?

Bioethics is the study of the moral implications of new and emerging medical technologies and looks to answer questions such as selling organs, euthanasia and whether should we clone people. The series consists of a series of interviews by leading bioethics academics and is aimed at individuals looking to explore often difficult and confusing questions surrounding medical ethics. The series lays out the issue in a clear and precise way and looks to show all sides of the debate.

We are happy to welcome you to our second Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook, Biochemistry Free For All. Biochemistry is a relatively young science, but its rate of growth has been truly impressive. The rapid pace of discoveries, which shows no sign of slowing, is reflected in the steady increase in the size of biochemistry textbooks. Growing faster than the size of biochemistry books have been the skyrocketing costs of higher education and the even faster rising costs of college textbooks. These unfortunate realities have created a situation where the costs of going to college are beyond the means of increasing numbers of students.

This course does not seek to provide answers to ethical questions. Instead, the course hopes to teach students two things. First, how do you recognize ethical or moral problems in science and medicine? When something does not feel right (whether cloning, or failing to clone) — what exactly is the nature of the discomfort? What kind of tensions and conflicts exist within biomedicine? Second, how can you think productively about ethical and moral problems? What processes create them? Why do people disagree about them? How can an understanding of philosophy or history help resolve them? By the end of the course students will hopefully have sophisticated and nuanced ideas about problems in bioethics, even if they do not have comfortable answers.

This exercise contains two interrelated modules that introduce students to modern biological techniques in the area of Bioinformatics, which is the application of computer technology to the management of biological information. The need for Bioinformatics has arisen from the recent explosion of publicly available genomic information, such as that resulting from the Human Genome Project.

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.

Biology is the science that studies life, but what exactly is life? This may sound like a silly question with an obvious response, but it is not always easy to define life. For example, a branch of biology called virology studies viruses, which exhibit some of the characteristics of living entities but lack others. It turns out that although viruses can attack living organisms, cause diseases, and even reproduce, they do not meet the criteria that biologists use to define life. Consequently, virologists are not biologists, strictly speaking. Similarly, some biologists study the early molecular evolution that gave rise to life; since the events that preceded life are not biological events, these scientists are also excluded from biology in the strict sense of the term. From its earliest beginnings, biology has restled with these questions: What are the shared properties that make something “alive”? And once we know something is alive, how do we find meaningful levels of organization in its structure?

This 28-minute video lesson provides an introduction to DNA. [Biology playlist: Lesson 6 of 71].