Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Biology 101: yeast cell division

We did not study yeast cells in Biology 101, I just made that up. I read that yeast cells are the most thoroughly studied organisms in biology. Bearing, as they do on bread and beer. Those little things are everywhere.

A long time ago I made a grid of nine tiny gifs held in a table. Now the page doesn't exist and the gif files were stored by a company that offered great introductory deals then raised their prices steadily and unreasonably. All of the files are gone. They were not backed up on other servers.

What a bummer!

It was a very good page too set to music, also stored on those servers. This is what it looked like, except this one is smaller and all one gif, and much simpler, and in English. I did this one in 4 or 5 minutes. The previous one took days to make.





To compensate for this tragic loss I made another one. This is also in one long gif instead of nine short ones. I'm trying to show the same thing. 

If you think about it, the organisms possess impressive survival techniques. They exist in multiple forms. With one set of DNA and with 2 sets of DNA, while at points of their replication they exist with 4 sets of DNA. When the environment becomes too harsh to handle they shrink down and protect their DNA tightly inside the nucleus and coat it with a protective shell. It can survive nearly anything the natural environment throws at it, wind, cold, dryness, heat. They get lifted high into the atmosphere and transported thousands of miles across the globe by jet streams and dropped right into your pudding. When they land in salubrious conditions they replicate themselves madly, living it up while they can, uninhibitedly by two means, sexually and asexually, or budding. For some reason that I haven't caught yet, scientist do not designate them male and female, rather, as corresponding types, "a" and "a." That's science for you. 


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