I’ve been locked away in jury duty for the past 1.5 weeks. All the while falling behind in each of my classes and feeling like the case was never going to end. Today, however, after many hours of deliberating, we finally turned in a verdict and got released from our service.

Now it’s catch-up time.

In General Biology class we have several chapters of Your Inner Fish to talk about as a nice segue from this impromptu break back into study. In the text, we will tackle the flow of energy through biological systems. In the simplest terms, this asks the question, “How do biological systems capture energy from their environment and use it for their own purposes?” This includes two basic pathways, Photosynthesis and Cell Respiration. What’s amazing is how similar these two processes are – each involves a cycle of reactions and each involves an ‘electron transport chain’. The electron transport parts of these pathways tie together some of the topics we covered earlier this semester regarding membranes, enzymes and diffusion.

In Microbiology, we will consider a couple of chapters from Offit’s Vaccinated and hopefully tie this in to an introduction to Virology. Key to this is an understanding of how viruses are put together, how they operate in getting into cells and how they can then co-opt cellular processes. The simplest way this is done is to direct systems to creating more virus particles, however, some viruses, like HPV do more to affect cell cycle and thereby not just produce more virus, but also initiate a cascade of events that may lead to cancer of the infected cells.

It’s good to be back.