Marijuana and Cocaine Substitutes

       I swear this blog is not being turned into part of a drug ring! This week my biology class had to blog about the nervous system, and two substances that affect the nervous system are marijuana and cocaine. Marijuana was recently extremely controversial in the United States with debates over whether it should be legalized or not. To add fuel to the fire, marijuana may actually help with diseases related to the nervous system! Cocaine is also a drug which stimulates the production of a substance known as dopamine in the brain. Like your parents would say, drugs are awful and will ruin your life, so I will talk about two things which have the same effect of stimulating pleasure and dopamine production, food and music!
       But first we need an actual biology lesson. The basic structural unit of the nervous system is the neuron, or nerve cell, which is seen in the diagram below.

Neurons consist of a cell body called the soma. The extensions of the soma which receive neurotransmitters are the dendrites. Then the long extension of the cell body is the axon which sends nerve impulses to other neurons. The axon is also covered in a myelin sheath which speeds the movement of chemical messengers. So the nervous system consists of chains of neurons which send chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters like a single file line of people doing the wave. We will get in to the specifics of this nerve messaging later, but I have to say neurons look like that guy, Agent Pleakley, from Lilo and Stitch. 

      One disease which damages these nerve cells is multiple sclerosis. Damage occurs when the nerve cells lose the myelin sheaths on their axons which makes it difficult to send messages to other neurons and causing scar tissue to form where the myelin sheath is missing. This is why it is named multiple sclerosis which means "many scars." Multiple sclerosis reminds me of the character Doodlebob from Spongebob Squarepants. 

 Doodlebob tried taking away Spongebob's life with his eraser like certain molecules involved in multiple sclerosis try to take away the myelin sheaths from axons of nerve cells with inflammatory molecules. Okay back to biology. Side effects of this disease are impairment of muscle control, speech, and vision, but recently scientists have conducted studies that show marijuana could ameliorate (SAT vocabulary for the win) these conditions. Marijuana contains substances known as cannabinoids. The presence of these substances prevents the production of inflammatory molecules from cells that remove the myelin sheaths from nerve cells. This is why when cannabinoids were given to mice that had partially paralyzed limbs, they were soon able to walk without a limp. Scientists now look to expand this treatment to humans. This would have been a very compelling argument in the legalization of marijuana. "It can allow the paralyzed to walk and do other miracles." On a serious note, I've always been one of those people who was completely against drugs under any circumstances, but if it could be used for medicinal purposes like helping multiple sclerosis patients regain movement, then maybe its use in certain instances should be reevaluated. 

       So how do neurons communicate? Neurons communicate using a form of local signaling called synaptic signaling. Synaptic signaling is the process by which nerve cells "fire" neurotransmitters into the synapse (the gap between adjacent neurons) to communicate with another neuron. The neurotransmitter signal molecules can leave the axon of one nerve cell in a vesicle in a process similar exocytosis entering the synapse. They will then be received by neuroreceptor proteins on a neighboring neuron's dendrite. To "fire" neurotransmitters, nerve cells have to achieve the action potential. Typically a nerve cell has a greater concentration of K+ ions inside of it and a greater concentration of Na+ ions outside of it. The inside of a cell is also negative due to proteins resting at a charge of -70mV. In order to fire a chemical message, the cell must raise its charge to -55mV, so it takes in Na+ ions and makes K+ions leave the cell causing the rising curve seen below. 

 

Once it passes the -55mV and becomes very positive, the prior concentration gradients of Na+ and K+ ions outside and inside of the cell are restored using the sodium potassium pump. One molecule that the brain can make to act as a neurotransmitter is dopamine whose passage between nerve cells ultimately stimulates pleasure. 

        Drugs like cocaine and amphetamine try to achieve this feeling of pleasure by producing dopamine in the brain. But drugs do not deserve any place in anyone's life, so they can be substituted with food and music! Ironically food and music also produce dopamine like cocaine. This makes a lot of sense to me because I receive instant pleasure just when I see Chipotle! Then when people play songs over and over because they love it, it's almost like they have a drug addiction (yeah, I know that's a ridiculous comparison). Maybe this is why people say listening to music helps them when they're running because the dopamine levels in your brain would counteract the pain your muscles would feel. From experience in spring track, I think even eating food before a race helps with pain resistance. Now I'm not saying to eat a Thanksgiving meal before you run the two mile race because otherwise that will be an even longer, more miserable experience. No pleasure at all. With music, dopamine is typically released when you feel a "chill" or "at a peak emotional moment." Imagine people's dopamine levels when Adele used to constantly play on the radio. They must have been drowning in dopamine! In the same article that described this effect of food and music on the brain, the writer also described this part of the brain called the auditory cortex. When this structure of the brain was stimulated electrically, people supposedly heard music. So scientists think that this part of the brain allows you to hear music in your head even when it's not being played.  

Biochemistry and Hot Dogs

      So this week, my teacher told my class that we had to blog about cellular respiration, and since all the videos I found were only related to the Ebola outbreak, I had no clue what to write about! Then after being inspired by our school's "America Day" during Spirit Week, I decided to blog about what Americans know best: hot dogs! One of the most well known competitive eating events is Nathan's annual hot dog eating contest at Coney Island, New York. I will not be talking about the energy Takeru Kobayashi burned when he stormed the stage in 2010, for I am only concerned with knowing how much energy is produced from all these eaten hot dogs? Sorry Kobayashi.

       Before we get into the amount of energy produced from these hot dogs, I will go over some basics of cellular respiration. In very simple terms, cellular respiration is a metabolic process by which the mitochondria of a cell tries to break down mainly organic molecules, like glucose, into a more easily accessed form of energy for cells, ATP. This aerobic process is defined by three main steps: glycolysis, the Krebs Cycle (also known as the Citric Acid Cycle) and oxidative phosphorylation in the electron transport chain (ETC).  Glycolysis operated in the cytoplasm is when glucose is split into two pyruvate molecules releasing energy in the form of ATP (a small amount) and electrons which are captured by NAD+ producing NADH. These pyruvate molecules then enter the mitochondria and the Krebs cycle where their molecular structure is manipulated and altered to produce NADH, FADH2, the biproduct CO2, and a small amount of ATP. Lastly with oxidative phosphorylation, the ETC of the mitochondria utilizes all of the electrons in the NADH and FADH2 molecules to move hydrogen molecules out of the cell thus creating a concentration gradient. When the hydrogen molecules cross the ETC through ATP synthase in an attempt to achieve equilibrium, they provide the energy needed to add a phosphate to ADP thus making ATP! The gradient is sustained by O2 molecules that adopt extra hydrogen ions to produce water (H2O). If oxygen is not present, glycolysis is followed by anaerobic fermentation (either alcoholic or lactic acid) to provide a steady supply of NAD+ to sustain glycolysis.  

        Now back to hot dogs! Hot dogs do not have glucose, but they are known to have fat. Fat is commonly used by the body to store energy. This is why if you eat a lot of food without "burning" this energy through exercise, odds are your body will have a substantial amount of fat. According to the USDA, one hot dog has approximately 13 grams of fat. Using Avogadro's number (6.0223 x 10^23), we can determine one hot dog has approximately 78,289,900,000,000,000,000 molecules of fat. That is cool, but we are well aware Joey Chestnut does not eat only 1 hot dog. Maybe "inhales" is a better word to describe how he scarfs down hot dogs. 

Last year, Joey Chestnut won the competition by eating 61 hot dogs (Thanks Wikipedia)! Based on information from this source, a molecule of fat produces 112 ATP molecules. Therefore it can be determined that when Joey Chestnut won the hot dog contest last year, he ultimately gained 53,487,659,680,000,000,000,000,000,000 ATP molecules. I usually hate people who make comments like the one I'm about to say, but it has to be acknowledged that millions of people are starving in the world without a reliable source of food, and meanwhile in America, we are gorging ourselves with hot dogs for fun!  

      The cells receiving all of this energy in the form of fat will most likely not break all of it down into ATP at one time. That's just dumb. The human body would not need all of this energy at once, and if you do, then you should see a doctor. For example, would you use an entire gallon of paint if you only had to paint a small piece of paper? No. This paint could be saved and used for when it's needed. This is the basic idea behind feedback mechanisms. Feedback mechanisms, or feedback inhibition, is where a product of a metabolic reaction inhibits an enzyme that is important in making an early step of the catabolic process possible. So if there is a large amount of ATP in the body, ATP will inhibit an enzyme involved in a step like glycolysis to inhibit the production of ATP. Then when the body needs more ATP, the enzyme will no longer be inhibited. You could also argue that instead of relying on feedback inhibition, you could just refrain from eating 61 hot dogs. That is very true, but you see, an alpha male does what an alpha male wants.  

      

     

   

Feeling Salty

      The title of this post really describes how I felt when I had to make this blog for my AP Biology Class. Not really, but I hope reading my blog is not a painful experience. Anyway, this week we're supposed to talk about cell membranes. Cell membranes are barriers that regulate what substances enter and leave the cell, and they consist of a double phospholipid bilayer with the hydrophilic phospholipid heads facing on the outside and the hydrophobic tails on the inside. Proteins are also embedded inside and attached to the outside of this bilayer. This is shown in the fluid mosaic model shown below:

  

The phospholipid heads are facing outwards while the tails are facing inward. It's like in a movie when two characters (in this case the phospholipids) are cornered by another group (water) in a fight scene, and they fight back to back! That's what I thought of for some reason. Anyway, cell membranes are also semi-permeable meaning they allow certain substances, such as water, to pass over the membrane more easily than others. This allows osmosis (the diffusion of water) to occur across the cell membrane, and it also gives one of the reasons for this blog post. If you survived the small biology lesson above, more interesting stuff will follow now! 

     So I was sitting my biology class, and for some reason we were talking about slugs and how they ruin gardens. This is why you could use egg shells to keep them out of your garden, but someone suggested pouring salt on the plants. Honestly, I started laughing because I'm a nerd. Also because I knew if someone did this, they wouldn't have just dead slugs but dead plants too. Civilizations actually used to pour salt on crop fields of countries they were at war with because it would ruin their crops which would hurt the nation's food supply needed to fight the war.
      Then why does salt kill plants? By pouring salt on plants, a hypertonic environment is created outside of plant cells because of this increase in solute concentration causing water to have a net flow out of plant cells and into the environment. The environments surrounding a cell can be described using three terms: hypertonic, hypotonic, and isotonic. As mentioned before, hypertonic describes an environment in which the solute concentration is greater than the solute concentration in the cell. Hypotonic describes an environment that has a lesser solute concentration than the solute concentration inside the cell. Then there's isotonic, which describes a state of equilibrium in which the solute concentrations in the cell and environment are equal. Also based on water potential, if enough salt is added, the environment will have a solute potential greater than the water potential within the plant cells once again explaining why water would move from the cell into the surrounding environment. This would cause cell membranes to shrink away from the cell wall, a condition known as plasmolysis. An example of plasmolysis in elodea cells is shown below:

Notice how the green cell membrane shrinks away from the rigid cell wall.

Plasmolysis is also the reasons why plant wilt because if the cell membranes do not push against the cell wall, the cells and plant are not turgid and thus lack the pressure to stand up. Therefore when plants are sufficiently watered, they are turgid and do not wilt. This water lost would also make it more difficult for the cell to carry out basic functions to sustain life explaining why plants die. In the end, the cell wall would probably be more shriveled than an old person left in a pool for too long.
     Even though all cells have cell membranes, the membrane proteins in this phospholipid bilayer vary greatly based on function. This set of membrane proteins include glycoproteins which have a polysaccharide chain attached and act as recognition proteins. Glycoproteins are like ID tags letting the immune system of organisms recognize which cells are foreign to the body allowing antibodies to be produced in order to eradicate them. Since membrane proteins are distinct to certain cells, scientists are using a method known as neutron reflectometry to learn and model the structures of bacteria cell walls in order to produce better antibiotics. As stated in this article, "over 60% of currently available drugs and 40% of new drugs target membrane proteins."  
     Not only are cell membranes vital to cell function with inner and outer cell activities, but membranes of organelles are also extremely important as they allow compartmentalization. Compartmentalization in very simple terms allow all necessary substances and materials to be in one place, or membrane bound organelle, for a certain cellular process. For example all of the substances needed for cellular respiration are found in the mitochondria while all substances needed for photosynthesis are found in the chloroplasts. Thus membranes keep cells from becoming like Ukraine at the moment: an ugly mess. Compartmentalization can be related to any sports team, like a soccer team. One team acts together as a cell, but the players are compartmentalized into defense, midfield, and offense so they can carry out different functions and get the job done. Compartmentalization also reminds me of a cruise ship. If the cruise ship is the cell, different floors are compartmentalized based on their purpose. So one floor will have only rooms for guests, another will have entertainment, another will have dining, and another will have pools and decks.    

     Though tattoos mainly depend on a machine that was based off of Benjamin Franklin's engraving machine (yeah, you're basically putting an engraving machine into your skin), these designs also depend on principles of biology with cell membranes. I also wanted to relate cell membrane properties to something more relevant than pouring salt on plants and elodea cells. So here is a video showing the process in really slow motion. Skip to 3:11, to see the cool part!

So tattoos work by using this needle-like machine to insert ink into the skin. Cohesion allows molecules that make up the ink to stay together in between the needles. The information explaining the biology of tattoos was found here. Tattoos do not insert ink into cells of the epidermis since this is where skin cells are shed very often. Instead, they insert ink into the layer of cells beneath the epidermis so ink can be taken up by dermal cells. Once the ink is in the dermal cells, the cell membrane's selectively permeable nature may not allow the molecules making up the ink to cross over the membrane and leave the cell. This is why tattoos stay in your skin, and even if the dermal cells die, they are taken up by other cells with the ink. Now if you cringe whenever you pick up salt thinking of this article or refuse to get a tattoo after seeing this video, then I consider this a job well done!