Month: May 2017

Part 1: Cancer Story

It all began when my 4-year-old host, Timmy, started getting the symptoms of Neuroblastoma.  The wheezing, the chest pain, he went through it all.  That’s when his mother decided to take him to the doctors.  She found it out of the ordinary that her usually energetic child, was becoming much more quiet because of the pain he was going through.  I am one of Timmy’s genes that went through some mutations because of the cancer found inside of his neuroblasts which are immature nerve cells that a fetus must create as part of its development process.  These nerve cells are supposed to grow and become functioning nerve cells, but, unfortunately, they become cancer cells instead. Because of the immature cells it is the reason why Neuroblastoma seems to only target children 5 and under.

At the beginning, Timmy’s cells grew and didn’t respond to the signals telling it to stop (like regular cells do).  Instead they began to multiply out of control.  This is what created his tumor.  To get to the stage I am today, I underwent a somatic mutation.  Somatic mutation is what is passed from the mutated cell during cell division.  The effects on poor Timmy’s body have not been the best.  Tumors have been growing on his spinal cord causing spinal cord compression which will eventually cause pain and paralysis. The cancer is also spreading quick to his bones, skin and liver.  Timmy is not the child that he used to be.  The cancer has made it impossible for him to have a normal child hood.  The treatment that Timmy’s parents must choose from include, surgery followed by watchful waiting, surgery followed by chemotherapy, radiation therapy or low-dose chemotherapy.  The surgery is meant to break the tumor and chemotherapy is meant to slow down the process.  Like every other type of cancer, there is no cure yet, but I, as a gene, believe that one day there will be and my dear host, Timmy, will get better!

Part 2 : The Making of the Cancer story

1.       What questions did you need to research in order to create your cancer story?

I did not have to type question after question in the google search bar in order to find my information as it was mostly found on the same two websites.  However, the questions I did search for were “What do the genes and cells undergo with neuroblastoma?”, “What are the treatments   to neuroblastoma?” and “What is the cause?”.

 

2.       What new or familiar digital tools did you try to use as you worked through this project?

I used the Riverside digital library at the beginning just to find the basics of neuroblastoma.  That was new for me.

 

3.        What was the process you used to further investigate this project?

I started this project by looking at neuroblastoma at a beginners level (since I had never heard anything about it).  But with every task that we were told to accomplish, I gained more knowledge. 

 

4.       How did you verify and cite the information that you found?

The websites that I used were all official health websites so that let me know they were giving out true information.

 

5.       How did the process of completing this challenge go?  What could you have done better?

Overall I find that the process went good.  It was a bit challenging at times since this cancer does have a lot of undiscovered aspects.  Something I wish I had done was work on this time earlier instead of procrastinating.

 

Links : http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/neuroblastoma/symptoms-causes/dxc-20164445

http://www.medicinenet.com/neuroblastoma/page6.htm

On Friday, our science class used a microscope to observe cells.  Some animal cells and some plant.  Unfortunately, I was absent so I wasn’t able to experience this lab “hands-on”.  My solution is to simply search up the cells that I would have been observing.  Which were onion cells and cheek cells.

Observations :

 

What can I observe about the onion cell?  Well, I can make out some of the parts of it.  Parts like the cell wall and what looks like the vacuole.

 

 

In this image of some cells from the inside of the cheek I can see the nucleus on the cells and apparently, the cytoplasm.  The nucleus are shown as blue dots in the middle of the cell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The question is, if I already didn’t know that these cells were plant and animal cells, how would I tell them a part?  A good way to do this is to look out for parts that plant cells have, that animal cells do not.  For example, cell walls and a chloroplast.  There are also parts that animal cells have but plant cells do not.  Like the vacuole!

During the lab, a substance called methylene blue was used with the cheek cell.  This was used to “stain” the cell.  Doing so enhances the cell underneath the microscope.   Methylene blue is a stain specifically used to enhance the nucleus in animal cells.

By doing some of this research, I got to find some real-life pictures of cells and not just a drawing in a text book.  I also found some ways on how to differentiate animal cells in plant cells.  All in all, I think that this lab will be useful later on in our biology unit.