12.491 is a seminar focusing on problems of current interest in geology and geochemistry. For Fall 2005, the topic is organic geochemistry. Lectures and readings cover recent research in the development and properties of organic matter.

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:Compare homologous and analogous traitsDiscuss the purpose of cladisticsDescribe maximum parsimony

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Discuss the need for a comprehensive classification systemList the different levels of the taxonomic classification systemDescribe how systematics and taxonomy relate to phylogenyDiscuss the components and purpose of a phylogenetic tree

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe horizontal gene transferIllustrate how prokaryotes and eukaryotes transfer genes horizontallyIdentify the web and ring models of phylogenetic relationships and describe how they differ from the original phylogenetic tree concept

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:Identify and describe the properties of lifeDescribe the levels of organization among living thingsRecognize and interpret a phylogenetic treeList examples of different sub disciplines in biology

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Identify and describe the properties of lifeDescribe the levels of organization among living thingsRecognize and interpret a phylogenetic treeList examples of different sub disciplines in biology

The topic of this video module is how to classify animals based on how closely related they are. The main learning objective is that students will learn how to make phylogenetic trees based on both physical characteristics and on DNA sequence. Students will also learn why the objective and quantitative nature of DNA sequencing is preferable when it come to classifying animals based on how closely related they are. Knowledge prerequisites to this lesson include that students have some understanding of what DNA is and that they have a familiarity with the base-pairing rules and with writing a DNA sequence.

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:

"Many animals live in symbiosis with beneficial microbes. These beneficial associations are stable over time because of partner fidelity between the animals and their microbes over multiple generations. Long-term fidelity in terrestrial host animals is well understood, but fidelity in marine symbioses, particularly in hosts with multiple symbionts, is understudied. To learn more, researchers recently examined partner fidelity between the gutless marine worm Olavius algarvensis and its seven bacterial symbionts. Fidelity varied considerably across the seven symbionts. Fidelity was highest for the two sulphur-oxidizing symbionts that provide the worms with most of their nutrition. In contrast, fidelity was lower or non-existent for other less-abundant, nutritionally less important symbionts. This variability in fidelity was unexpected, because O. algarvensis pass their symbionts directly to their offspring from one generation to the next..."

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

Investigating a Deep Sea Mystery is based on Deep-sea mystery solved: astonishing larval transformation and extreme sexual dimorphism unite three fish families by Johnson, et al. (2009)* published in Biology Letters, Royal Society. The deep sea fishes at the heart of the investigation and this activity were historically classified into three families or clades based on the obvious morphological differences between the members of each group. Over time, as new data was accumulated, a new hypothesis was generated; the three fish clades were really one. Johnson, et al. found patterns in collection data that supported an alternative relationship; that they are the males, females, and larvae of a single family or clade, and that the morphological differences are the result of extreme ontogenetic (developmental) metamorphosis and sexual dimorphism. In this activity students follow the steps of the science team to unravel the mystery of the fishes' classification by analyzing some of the same morphological and phylogenetic data as the science team.

This is the second in a series of majoręs biology classes covering the principles of biology. The course is an integrated study of basic concepts concerning animal biology emphasizing animal evolution, diversity, phylogeny and a comparative look at general principles of animal form and function. This course is a lab science class and students will be required to participate in weekly lab activities and document their lab work for successful course completion.

Biol & 213 is the third course of a year-long series of biology courses for Biology majors. The first third of the course surveys prokaryotes, protists, fungi, and plants, focusing on diversity, evolution, and life cycles from an evolutionary perspective. We will then describe plant anatomy, physiology, growth, responses to the environment, and reproduction, emphasizing flowering plants. We will finish with ecology, focusing on population, and community ecology and expanding outward to ecosystems and the introduction of biodiversity and conservation.

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:

"Uncovering the links between microbiome profiles and host conditions is critical to understanding the roles microbes play in human health. However, analysis of microbiome profiles with traditional testing frameworks is made difficult by the high-dimensionality and sparsity of the data. Often this is addressed by incorporating information from closely related microbes. This phylogenetic information is added under the assumption that operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from related taxa will tend to behave similarly, but the complexity of microbe interactions can make this assumption invalid. The recently developed tool, Phylogeny-guided microbiome OTU-Specific association Test (POST), addresses this issue. POST determines how much, if any, information to borrow from neighboring OTUs based on phylogenetic distance and outcome-OTU association. This tool is a local collapsing test built under the kernel machine framework to accommodate complex OTU effects..."

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

This outline was created to be used by my online Fundamentals of Biology students at West Hills College, Lemoore. It is intended to be used with Concepts of Biology by Open Stax.