In chapter three in the course, we will discuss how cells get the energy they need in order to run every day processes. There are some differences in how animal cells do this compared to how plant cells do this. We will talk about enzymes and how they allow most of the biochemical processes of the cell to happen so quickly. There are specific ways that cells use glucose as an energy source under different circumstances, which will be covered as well. These are complex processes that you should understand as best you can. In addition, we will talk about the process of photosynthesis and how this contributes to plant cell energetics. The focus of chapter four will be to study the ways a cell can communicate with other cells or with its environment. There are different ways that cell can do this. There are often receptors that trigger events in the cell through what’s called signal transduction. We will also talk about the cell cycle and how it is regulated. There are processes a cell goes through from the time it becomes a daughter cell until it dies that we will discuss in this chapter. In chapter five of the course, we take a look at heredity as it applies to biological systems and organisms. On a small scale, heredity involves the process of meiosis, which is how most eukaryotic organisms pass on genetic information from one generation to the next with the ability to have genetic diversity in the subsequent generation. We will also discuss genetics in general, including Mendelian genetics first identified by Gregor Mendel in the late 1800s. There is also non-Mendelian genetics, which doesn’t follow typical Mendelian rules. There are also environmental effects on an organism’s phenotype that have nothing to do with inheritance. Finally, we will talk about chromosomal inheritance patterns, which involve larger effects on the organism because more than one or a few genes are involved in the passage of traits to the offspring. Chapter six expands on the study of genes and genetics to involve the molecular basis of nucleic acids, including how they are used to make new copies of a cell or make proteins for the cell using process like DNA replication, transcription, and translation. These are well-understood by biologists as part of the study of molecular biology. You will also learn about the regulation of gene expression and how gene expression gets used to create specialized cells in a multicellular organism. We will talk about mutations and
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