LEC 1 Reading Guide

What are some characteristics that separate living organisms from non-living entities?

Complexity/organization, ability to respond to the environment, metabolize, reproduce, and capacity to evolve

Are viruses alive? Why or why not?

No. They are not cellular, they don’t respond to the environment or metabolize

What are the three domains in life? Which of the domains is/are prokaryotes? What is an important difference between a eukaryote and a prokaryote?

Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. Archaea and Bacteria. Eukaryotes can be multicellular and have a nucleus.

What does the tree showing the three domains of life tells us about how Eukarya, Archaea, and Bacteria are related to each other? Which other domain are Archaea most closely related to? Which domain do animals belong to?

Where do Archaea and Bacteria live? What roles do they play ecologically?

What is the genetic material of all living organisms? What are the FOUR key characteristics of it?

DNA.

What allows for a diversity of structure in DNA?

Why is it important to be able to replicate DNA? What needs to happen in order for DNA to replicate? What is the end product of DNA replication?

What does it mean to say there was a mutation? What do mutations lead to? Are they all bad?

What does it mean to say that mutations are spontaneous and random?

What are proteins and what do they do?

What is a gene?

What is meant by the phrase “the central dogma”?

Passing of information in cells goes from DNA → RNA (mRNA) → protein

What is transcription? What regulates it? What is a key enzyme that is part of this process? What is different about base pairing in transcription as opposed to DNA replication?

DNA → RNA.

What is translation? How does the ribosome do translation and what is a ribosome made of? What is an anticodon? What is the end product of translation?

RNA → protein.

Three kinds of RNA play roles in the central dogma: what are their names and roles?

mRNA, rRNA, and tRNA.

What is the genetic code? How do you use the table that contains the genetic code?

What process produced the diversity of life that we see all around us?

What are the three requirements for evolution by natural selection?

What is the root of a phylogenetic tree? What are the tips of a tree? In what direction does time run on a phylogenetic tree? What is a node? What does MRCA stand for?

Given a set of species and a phylogenetic tree, how can you tell which species are more closely related to one another?

How can you compare two phylogenetic trees to each other to tell if they are equivalent?

Is the vast majority of life microscopic () or macroscopic ()?

Why are rRNA genes used to build the tree of life?