General Biology.Pdf
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General Biology Wikibooks.org March 15, 2013 On the 28th of April 2012 the contents of the English as well as German Wikibooks and Wikipedia projects were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. An URI to this license is given in the list of figures on page 175. If this document is a derived work from the contents of one of these projects and the content was still licensed by the project under this license at the time of derivation this document has to be licensed under the same, a similar or a compatible license, as stated in section 4b of the license. The list of contributors is included in chapter Contributors on page 169. The licenses GPL, LGPL and GFDL are included in chapter Licenses on page 179, since this book and/or parts of it may or may not be licensed under one or more of these licenses, and thus require inclusion of these licenses. The licenses of the figures are given in the list of figures on page 175. This PDF was generated by the LATEX typesetting software. The LATEX source code is included as an attachment (source.7z.txt) in this PDF file. To extract the source from the PDF file, we recommend the use of http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ utility or clicking the paper clip attachment symbol on the lower left of your PDF Viewer, selecting Save Attachment. After extracting it from the PDF file you have to rename it to source.7z. To uncompress the resulting archive we recommend the use of http://www.7-zip.org/. The LATEX source itself was generated by a program written by Dirk Hünniger, which is freely available under an open source license from http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Huenniger/wb2pdf. This distribution also contains a configured version of the pdflatex compiler with all necessary packages and fonts needed to compile the LATEX source included in this PDF file. Contents 1 Getting Started 3 2 Biology - The Life Science 5 2.1 Characteristics of life . 5 2.2 Nature of science . 6 2.3 Scientific method . 6 2.4 Charles Darwin . 9 2.5 After Darwin . 9 2.6 Challenges to Darwin . 10 3 The Nature of Molecules 11 3.1 Matter . 11 3.2 The atom . 11 3.3 Mass and isotopes . 12 3.4 Electrons . 12 3.5 Chemical bonds . 13 3.6 Chemical reactions . 13 3.7 Water . 13 4 The Chemical Building Blocks of Life 15 4.1 Carbon . 15 4.2 Carbohydrates . 15 4.3 Stereoisomers . 16 4.4 Lipids . 16 4.5 Proteins . 16 4.6 Hereditary (Genetic) information . 18 5 Life: History and Origin 19 5.1 Properties of life . 19 5.2 Origin of life: 3 hypotheses . 19 5.3 The early earth . 20 5.4 Origin of cells . 21 5.5 The RNA world? . 21 5.6 The earliest cells . 21 5.7 Major steps in evolution of life . 22 6 Cells 23 7 Cell structure 25 7.1 What is a cell? . 25 7.2 History of cell knowledge . 29 III Contents 7.3 Microscopes . 30 7.4 Cell size . 30 8 Structure of Eukaryotic cells 31 8.1 Structure of the nucleus . 31 8.2 Chromatin . 32 8.3 Endoplasmic reticulum . 32 8.4 The Golgi apparatus . 34 8.5 Ribosomes . 34 8.6 DNA-containing organelles . 34 8.7 Cytoskeleton . 35 9 Membranes 37 9.1 Biological membranes . 37 9.2 Phospholipid . 38 9.3 Fluid mosaic model . 38 9.4 Membrane proteins . 38 9.5 Receptor-mediated endocytosis . 40 10 Cell-cell interactions 41 10.1 Cell signaling . 41 10.2 Communicating junctions . 42 11 Energy and Metabolism 43 11.1 Energy . 43 11.2 Oxidation–Reduction . 43 11.3 NAD+ ...................................... 44 11.4 Free energy . 44 11.5 Enzymes . 44 11.6 ATP . 46 11.7 Biochemical pathways . 46 12 Respiration: harvesting of energy 47 12.1 Energy . 47 12.2 Respiration . 47 12.3 Respiration of glucose . 47 12.4 Alternative anaerobic respiration . 47 12.5 Glycolysis overview . 48 12.6 Regeneration of NAD+ ............................. 48 12.7 Alcohol fermentation . 48 12.8 Lactate formation . 48 12.9 Krebs cycle: overview . 49 12.10 ATP production . 49 12.11 Evolution of aerobic respiration . 49 13 Photosynthesis 51 13.1 Light Reactions . 51 13.2 “Dark” reactions . 53 13.3 Prokaryote cell division . 53 IV Contents 13.4 Bacterial DNA replication . 54 13.5 Chromosome number . 54 13.6 Eukaryotic chromosomes . 54 13.7 Chromosome organization . 55 13.8 Human karyotype stained by chromosome painting . 55 13.9 Chromosomes . 55 13.10 Human chromosomes . 55 13.11 Mitotic cell cycle . 55 13.12 Replicated human chromosomes . 56 13.13 Mitosis . 56 13.14 Plant mitosis . 56 13.15 Controlling the cell cycle . 56 13.16 Cancer . 57 13.17 Mutations and cancer . 57 14 Sexual reproduction 59 14.1 Sexual . 59 14.2 Sexual life cycle . 59 14.3 Meiosis . 59 14.4 Prophase I: synapsis . 60 14.5 Crossing over . 60 14.6 Microtubules and anaphase I . 60 14.7 Meiosis II . 60 14.8 Evolution of sex . 60 14.9 Consequences of sex . 61 15 Genetics 63 16 Gregor Mendel and biological inheritance 65 16.1 Mendel . 65 16.2 Mendel’s experiments . 66 16.3 Mendel’s seven pairs of traits . 66.