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Correlation Between Regional Gene Evolution

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Through the process of this study, students intended to illustrate the presence, or lack thereof, of an affiliation between regional gene evolution, globular gene copy number variation, and individual protein production status (Tracey 2017). It was hypothesized that the student’s ancestral diet included relatively high levels of starch-rich foods; thus the number of amylase, alpha 1 (AMY1) diploid gene copies that they retained and their production of the amylase enzyme would be significantly higher than the mean values of the students as a collective. The students followed the procedural guidelines of the Winter 2017 Biology 1A03 Laboratory Manual with minimal procedural modifications made (Tracey 2017). It was revealed that the student, …show more content…

In order to evaluate this hypothesis, the student had to compute their exact salivary amylase concentration -as measured in milligrams per millilitres, - the number of amylase gene copies encoded in their DNA, and their ancestral dietary starch consumption. Ultimately this would aid in determining whether a correlation exists amongst genome evolution within populations, individual gene duplicate numbers and protein concentrations (Tracey 2017).

For the protocols employed throughout the study refer to the Winter 2017 Biology 1A03 Laboratory Manual, experiments two through eight (Tracey). Let it be noted that severely alterations were made to these procedures. During experiment four, the salivary samples were centrifuged for a total of sixty seconds rather than five as per the discretion of the teaching assistant (Tracey 2017). Moreover, the directions for experiment six required students to pipet ten microlitres of their buccal samples into a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tube but did not account for the fact that the micropipette tips would not fit into the samples tubes (Tracey 2017). Thus, students poured small quantities of the culture into a microcentrifuge tube first and then measured out the ten microlitres from there. Finally, while the script for experiment

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