Stress Induced Reactions at the Cellular Level

The Science of Stress is an informative video by National Geographic detailing the body response to stress. Stress is the body’s way of getting itself prepared to face a challenge. It is constant problem that everyone has to deal with. It was originally meant to aid our survival, but over time it has become dangerous and lethal to our well being. National Geographic’s video gives us a scientific view of what goes on in our bodies when experiencing stress and its effects on it.

The purpose of this experiment was to indirectly study the effects of environmental stress on cell membranes. Watercourses have been with discarding of domestic and manufacturing, for centuries. Alarms have only escalated about the ecological alterations in the recent years of what would be the consequences. Scientists have developed a thorough investigation in search of various man harmful waste that is damaging the environment of watercourses.

Stress has a huge impact on the immune system. The immune system is interconnected. For example the immune, nervous, and endocrine system is linked through specialized communication pathways involving hormones, neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and immune cell productions. Stress reactions can directly affect the various response systems and how they handle the neuroendocrine-products. This stress reaction directly affects the hypothalamus and pituitary peptides through the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. Some of these stressors might be life events, anxiety, and excitements.

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers is a book about the physiology of stress. It gets into great detail about what exactly is going on inside the body during periods of high stress, and also what short and long term affects are caused by that stress. The first chapter give a brief description of each chapter in the rest of the book. Each subsequent chapter explains different stressors, levels of stress, and hormonal responses to stress. Many of the chapters also include research and discoveries on how stress affects the human body, many of which are somewhat recent discoveries, only occurring in the last one hundred years or so. Robert Sapolsky is able to explain to his readers much about the physiology of stress and how endocrinology plays the most

Aims ---- The aim of this experiment was to determine the effects of stress on the immune system. This was determined by analysing how quickly a person’s wound healed. It naturally is clearly difficult to create stress within a group of participants to examine how stress does affect your immune system.

The human body is an intricately interlinked organism. Every system of the body has a role to play in the well being of the other. The most prevalent disease of the modern age is cancer, and there has been considerable effort to determine the causes of cancer. Substantial research in this regard point to stress being one of the leading causes of cancer.

Most studies of the relationship between stress and the immune system have focussed on acute(i.e. short lived) stressors and have found a decrease in immune cell function.

In this lab, we are going to learn how the stress of temperature affects fresh beets. We have come to learn that cell membranes organize the chemical activities of cells. All cells are made of plasma membranes, often called fluid mosaics. It is sometimes described as a mosaic because it is made of protein molecules that are embedded into phospholipids. Phospholipids are the main structural support of the membrane and the proteins perform most of the functions of a membrane. Together they form boundaries or barriers between the cell itself and its surroundings, like the membrane of an egg. Plasma membranes also control what substances come in and out and also dispose of the

In Stress-induced somatization is spouses of deployed and nondeployed serviceman, authors Burton et al.’s (2009) found “spouses of deployed serviceman had significantly higher perceived stress scores than spouses of nondeployed service members”. The authors used a survey research type of study with participatory information was demonstrated in the response information. They describe their main claim is to compare the perceived stress experienced by spouses of deployed versus non deployed servicemen. A sub claim is “compare the level of somatization experienced” in both groups. An additional sub claim is to “determine the relationship between perceived stress and level of somatization experienced by spouses” (p.333)

STL1 is a sugar transporter protein; it plays a role in transporting glucose across the membrane. In our experiment we expected that STL1 would be up regulated in the presence of sorbitol stress but it was down regulated. The gene being down regulated means its cellular components was decreased under the stress. STL1 is a sugar transporter and that is important for ATP production which is needed for cell growth, it makes sense that the cells did not grow under stress or the gene would have been up

Responses to environmental stress have been described in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. These studies have shown that bacteria display elaborate responses to environmental stress which improve survival by altering bacterial physiology. The SOS response is induced when bacteria are threatened by the presence of agents that cause DNA damage which enhance the bacterium’s ability to repair DNA and inhibit cell division,[26]. The stringent response, in the face of nutrient limitation, decreases protein synthesis and stimulates amino acid biosynthesis when protein synthesis substrates are scarce,[27-28]. Heat shock factors are expressed at raised temperatures that break down and restructure denatured proteins and also restore alterations to chromosomal topology that occur as a result of temperature,[29-30]. Finally components of the cold shock response have been shown to alter mRNA secondary structures, formed as a result of low temperature, which hinder the translational machinery,[31, 31].

In response to heat-shock, yeast extracts up-regulate the HSP 30 gene by producing more proteins the same way bacteria cells up-regulate gene expression. In an environmental stress, such as heat shock, proteins inside a cell will degenerate. Once the protein is exposed to heat shock, the weak interactions that hold the proteins’ tertiary structure will degrade. Therefore, the cell must use the chaperone proteins to re-fold the degraded proteins. In order to create more chaperone proteins, the HSP 30 gene must be turned on. It is essential that the HSP 30 gene in yeast extracts are frequently turned on (up-regulated) to produce more chaperone proteins. Therefore, the experiment was conducted to test the expression of a particular gene, called

The trouble begins when multiple life incidents hit us all at once and this is because during periods of dramatic changes, individuals are more vulnerable to stress (Jones & Bright, 2001). Therefore, stress has got the ability to activate pretty every system within the body, however, through a rather rudimentary mechanism which lies within the cellular level (Shreedhar et al., 2010).

At one time or another, most people experience stress. The term stress has been used to describe a variety of negative feelings and reactions that accompany threatening or challenging situations. However, not all stress reactions are negative. A certain amount of stress is actually necessary for survival. For example, birth is one of the most stressful experiences of life. The high level of hormones released during birth, which are also involved in the stress response, are believed to prepare the newborn infant for adaptation to the challenges of life outside the womb. These biological responses to stress make the newborn more alert promoting the bonding process and, by extension, the child's physical survival.

Stress is a state of emotional or mental tension or strain resulting from very demanding and adverse circumstances in an individual’s life. The term general adaptation syndrome (GAS) is used in describing the long-term and short-term reactions to stress through its three stages that explain an individual’s experience with stress. The alarm reaction stage is the initial stage where an individual reacts immediately to a stressor exhibiting a "fight or flight" response that prepares one’s body for any physical activity. This stage may however, result in decreased immune system effectiveness, making individuals more prone to an illness during this phase. The resistance is the second stage where f stress continues one’s the body forms an adaptation to the stressors with different levels of changes taking place to reduce the effectors stress. The exhaustion stage is the third one where one’s body resistance resistance to stress may gradually reduce or collapse quickly meaning that one’s immune system to resisting diseases may be almost eliminated.