2009 Skills for Success Workshop

Carnivorans include carnivores, omnivores, and even a few primarily herbivorous species, such as the Giant Panda. Important teeth for carnivorans are the large, slightly recurved canines, used to dispatch prey, and the carnassial complex, used to rend meat from bone and slice it into digestible pieces.

We compare the carnassial teeth of carnivores with their skull [...]

Group:
Dylan Storey, Ayla Norris, Letitia Olson
Project:
We decided to compare the length of the whale to the length of their pectoral fin.  Using google image search we accessed a large variety of whale images.  We loaded these pictures into ImageJ and measured the length of the whale from the nose to the end of their body [...]

Hypothesis: The ratio of owner to dog body width remains relatively constant and should produce a bell curve indicating that owners and dogs share a relative size ratio. (ie if the owner over-eats, then they tend to allow their dog to over-eat.)
We found that the dogs tended to mirror their owners in relation to relative [...]

 
 
 
Knoxville
Oak Ridge

Our goal was to compare a larger city such as Knoxville with a smaller city such as Oak Ridge.  We wanted to focus on large structures and objects that would help us to compare the two cities in terms of population density and industrialization.  We measured the land area occupied by three types of [...]

We measured 20 distances between buildings from arial views of New York City, Paris and Beijing found using Google Maps, and compared the average distance between buildings for each of these cities as well as the standard deviation of distances within a city. We hypothesized that Beijing would have the least distance between buildings while [...]

Hypothesis: In a night sky, two bright stars will be on average farther apart from each other compared to two dim stars.
To test our hypothesis, we opened an image of a stary night sky, http://blogs.yogajournal.com/night%20sky.jpg, in ImageJ and measured the distances between stars in units of pixels. We imported our data into an excel spreadsheet to [...]

By Xiaomin and Jianzhuang
Introduction: Wnt proteins form a family of highly conserved secreted signaling molecules
that regulate cell-to-cell interactions during embryogenesis. Wnt proteins bind to
receptors of the Frizzled and LRP families on the cell surface. Mutations in Wnt genes or
Wnt pathway components lead to specific developmental defects, while various human
diseases, including cancer, are caused by abnormal [...]

Goup:
Ben Ernest, Joel Bucci, Letitia Olson
Intro:
Cytochrome C oxidase is an enzyme in the electron transport chain that catalyzes electron transfer to reduce oxygen to water.  This reaction produces protons, which are then used to power the ATP synthases
Reference:
Axel Harrenga and Hartmut Michel. The Cytochrome c Oxidase from Paracoccus denitrificans Does Not Change the Metal Center [...]

Intro:
This particular enzyme is an oxidative enzyme that imparts bioluminescence to the firefly Photinus pyralis. In research, the enzyme is used to study anesthetic-protein interactions.
Ref:

Structural basis for the inhibition of firefly luciferase by a general anesthetic.
Franks, N.P.,  Jenkins, A.,  Conti, E.,  Lieb, W.R.,  Brick, P. Biophys.J. v75 pp. 2205-11, 1998
Image:

Interpretation: Most of the [...]

Intro: Gyrase is a protein involved in maintaining the negative supercoiled structure of DNA. It is a two subunit protein and its function in DNA is ATP dependent. Because of its function gyrase is involved in many DNA associated processes including replication, transcription and repair.
DNA Gyrase: Structure and Function
Reece, R.J.; Maxwell, A
Crit Rev Biochem Mol [...]