Lec.1 Flashcards
What is the Holocene?
Current geological epoch , i.e. the last 11.5 thousand years.
What is the Pleistocene?
Geological epoch before holocene, from 2.5 million years to 11.5 thousand years, (often referred to as the ice age).
What is convergent evolution?
The independent evolution of similar phenomena = parallel evolution.
Why did Linneus name a group of organisms after female body features?
His opposition to the practice of wet-nursing led him to name mammals after
“mammae” (teats/breasts).
Where did the genus Homo originate?
Africa
How old is our species Homo sapiens?
at least 200,000 years.
What is the original meaning of diet?
Way of life.
What parts of the onion plant form the onion bulb?
Modified leaves
Give an example fo edible plant resin.
Gum arabic
What do most vegetables look radically different from the ancestral plants from which they descend?
Over 10 years of massive artificial selection by humans have altered most crops.
Name two species of grass eating primates
Humans and Gelada baboons of Ethiopia.
What two crucial reproductive services are provided to plants by animals?
Pollination and seed dispersal.
Plants exploit animals for seed dispersal via the fruit they make. Can you think of an animal that exploits colorful seeds for its own needs?
Bower birds in Papua New Guinea and humans who make bees out of plant seeds.
Where are the flowers of fig trees located on the plant?
Inside the figs (syconia).
How do fig trees signal to animals that their fruit are ripe?
Color change (turn yellow, orange or red)softness, and sweetness.
Give an example of a biological feature that measures roughly 1 m, 1 mm, 1 um, 2nm:
large pumpkin ~1m, small plant mustard seed ~1 mm, bacterium ~1 um, thickness of DNA ~2nm:
List the four major classes of biomolecules.
Nucleic acids, proteins, glycans, lipids.
Give three example each of plants rich in proteins, fats and sugars:
proteins: beans pulses and nuts
fats: coconut, avocado and olives
sugars: sugar cane, potatoes and corn
Why is milk white?
Because suspended oil droplets reflect light in all directions.
Is lactose A disaccharide
Yes
What are the principle proteins founding mammalian milk?
Caseins (so named because they precipitate during cheese production) and whey proteins (so named because they remain soluble in the whey).
How are glycans and lipids encoded in the genome?
They are not encoded in the genome, they come from the diet.
Which were the last two continents to be settled by human populations?
The Americas, LESS THAN 30,000 years ago
Both starch (amylose) and cellulose are long polymers of glucose. Why is the former easy to digest and the latter not?
Because of the different type of glycosidic linkage connecting the individual glucose molecules.
Animals cell lack cell walls, does this mean that they are not covered by sugar molecules?
No, all animal cells are covered by glycans
How was it possible to generate the evolutionary tree (phylogeny) of cellular life (i.e. compare cells as different as paramecia, fruitflies, worms and humans)
By comparing the DNA sequence encoding highly conserved ribosomal RNA.
What type of possibilities does the availability of genomes of domestic animals and plants open?
They allow the reconstruction of the history of domestication, allow novel possibilities for breeding and for crop improvement.
Both plants and animals have high surface area structures, in plants it is the foliage and the roots, which structures in animals have very high surface areas?
Lungs for gas exchange and digestive tract for nutrient absorption.
