Disciplinary Recourse Guide for Biology Majors

Wisley Leandre
ENGW105
Ms. Jimisha Relerford
February 27, 2016

This is a resource guide for students within the biology field. This guide contains
resources that could prove to be beneficial to a Biology students journey through Howard.
Journals
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020302
This is a journal article discusses Life as we know it, what more we have to discover
about life, and the challenge of finding life on other planets. This journal makes the point that we
lack a definition of life that could guide a search for life outside Earth. The cause of this is the
fact that we only have one example of life, and this example is life on earth. The author gives
different definitions of life, one of which is that life is a material system that undergoes
reproduction, mutation, and natural selection. He discusses that typical approach to discovering
life is by finding what life needs, such as energy, carbon, liquid water, nitrogen, sulfur, and
phosphorous. While those may be what an organism on Earth needs to survive, an organism on
another planet may need something else to live. The author argues that life on other planets may
be completely different. To end the journal article, he discusses searching for alien life. He makes
the point that we may have technology that assists us finding life similar to ours, but if the
organism was truly alien then our technology wouldnt work. He gives a different approach to
search for new life.
Biology is defined as the study of life, and as a student within the field, one of your objectives
would be to give new meaning to life, make ground breaking discovery on life, to increase the
complexity within the definition of the concept, and to also to get a better understanding of life.
This would also greatly assist in finding new life on other planets.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002330
This Journal discusses breast cancer and the protein that causes the progression of the
cancer. The author discusses a new discovery within a study on breast cancer. The discovery
within the study was that the protein, ELF5, drives the spread of tumor cells within the lungs.
ELF5 is described in the journal as a key determinant of anti-estrogen therapy resistance. The
discovery from this study shows hat ELF5 may be behind the two most important processes that
cause luminal breast cancers to progress towards the lethal phenotype; resistance to anti-estrogen
therapy and the development of metastatic activity. The author also discusses the effects of this
protein on cancerous cells, for example ELF5 in cancer cells causes inflammation in tumors.
This discovery and new understanding of how breast cancer progresses paves the way for new
strategies in treating the disease, and new ways to test the activity of the disease and see how it
progresses or regresses. As a biology student, youll be conducting a lot of problem solving, and
it includes solving problems within diseases such as cancer. This problem solving will included a
lot of research and a lot of analysis. This journal is an example of such research and what comes
from researching and problem solving. As a student within the biology field, whether you decide
to be an optometrist or a neurologist, one of your objectives is to improve the health of people,
and to do that you must first find the problem within diseases, such as cancer, that deteriorates
the health of people, and then begin to think of solutions. This journal is a great resource in
aiding understanding the process of researching and problem solving.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002056

This journal discusses the ongoing epidemic of Ebola cases, steps to achieve control of
the disease and the prevention of other cases, and also the projections of deaths from the disease.
The author develops a branching process model in order to address the issues. The model
includes the number of new infection caused by each case, the feedback between new
cases and hospital demand under a range of plausible intervention
scenarios, particularly the increase of treatment facilities over time and
increasing the number of individuals seeking hospital treatment through
outreach and education, transmission scenarios to health care workers in
hospitals, to caregivers in the community, to hospital visitors, and to
individuals preparing bodies for funerals are also included. Results suggest
that the outcome of the epidemic depends on both hospital capacity and
individual behavior. Additionally, the model highlights the conditions under
which transmission might have outpaced hospital capacity, and projects
possible epidemic trajectories into 2015. Biology doesnt only include consist
of dissecting animals and looking through a microscope. Biology involves
mathematics, problem solving, statistics, data, and analysis. In this journal
article the author, uses data to generate projections of deaths, number of
new infections, the increase of treatment facilities, and the transmission
scenarios. The use of this data and its projection, will assist in achieving
control of the disease. This article shows that as a Biology student, the use of
mathematics will be imperative. It will assist in problem solving situations,
such as the one discussed in the article.