Trisomy 18

There is a beautiful couple in my church that had a baby. They had a little baby girl named Arielle. Unfortunately, little Arielle was born with a genetic disorder: trisomy 18.

Trisomy 18 is also known as Edward's syndrome. This condition is where there is an extra 18th chromosome. For some reason, this syndrome is found mostly in females than males.

There are a host of issues that come along with that extra chromosome:

• heart defects
• mental disability
• growth and developmental issues
• breathing and feeding problems
• joint contractures
• cleft lip/palate
• spaced eyes
• and many other problems

Half of the children that are born with this syndrome die within the first week. The oldest one has lived was to age 10. I can say that baby Arielle lived for 5 months and 1 week. She beat a lot of odds. She ministered to hundreds around her. While she never lived a full life, she will have an eternity when Jesus returns.

An Awesome Lady with Cool Research

On Monday, Dr. Oluwatoyosi Muse visited for our Departmental meeting. She presented on her research. The title was "Sequence Selective Recognition of Biologically Relevant RNA by Cationic". It was an incredibly interesting presentation and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

But what was interesting is that for part of her experiment, she used HEK, which are human embryonic kidney cells. I should have asked why she used those cells. Maybe because they were able to highly replicate, or the destination for what she was testing was in there. Either way, it was cool that she has able to retrieve human embryonic kidney cells and test them.

Sea Urchin Fertilization

On Thursday, I was able to watch fertilization occur!

In lab, we used sea urchins (SU) to watch fertilization. I scooped out my own sea urchin from the tank and put it in the holding bin. While there, named the SU Terry (a unisex name). As Terry was getting acclimated to that water, I got a cup filled with sea water, a petri dish, a needle, potassium chloride, and paper towels. I also put on gloves. It was time.

I got Terry and placed it on the petridish. I turned it over to expose its bottom. Poor thing was not happy. The needle was filled with 1 milliliter of potassium chloride. Angling the needle between the needle portion and the opening, I injected Terry with 0.5 milliliters of potassium chloride. Poor thing was in pain and writhing around. :(

After about a minute, the gametes started flowing out of Terry. It was white, so we determined that Terry was in fact a boy! So we collected the rest of the sperm in the petri dish.

To watch fertilization, I got another group's eggs and put 1 drop of it on a microscope slide and covered it with a cover slip. Then, I got a small beaker and filled it with 10 ml of water. I then pipetted some of the sperm in the water to activate it. After focusing on the eggs under the microscope on the 40x objective, a drop of sperm solution was added to the slide. Looking at the slide, I was able to see the sperm vigorously swimming around. Looking at the eggs, it was clear to see which sperm fertilized eggs. It was also cool to see the fast block prevent polyspermy. The most awesome part was watching the fertilization envelope develop.

Just to watch what we have been learning occur before my very eyes was beautiful. It helps to make a lot of the concepts make sense.

"Mom... What Am I?!"

People don't usually ask what they are in terms of gender. You know definitively if you are a male or female. But this wasn't the case in the Law and Order: SVU episode entitled 'Identity'.  

In this episode, the suspects were a set of identical twins that were a boy and girl. Honestly, that should raise a red flag right now. Identical twins can only be one gender. So that fact that it was both a boy and girl should suggest that some gender reassignment has occurred.

When the twin boys went in for circumcision, the doctor botched one of the twins circumcision. This led the parents to then raise that child as a girl. It was fine at first, but as the girl reached puberty, she found herself liking girls. She was very confused as who she was because she felt like a boy on the inside. She soon found out that she was actually a boy, and the 'vitamins' her parents have been giving her were actually estrogen pills. So the girl stops taking the pills so she can go back to her original gender: a boy.

It was an interesting episode that discussed the science and ethics behind gender roles and reassignment.

http://lawandorder.wikia.com/wiki/Identity_(SVU)