This is the group #1 home page for Dr. Rainer Glaser's group project for Winter Semester 1997.
Silly Putty was formed by several residents of Wolpers Hall and Nicholas Pavelka (who we know from Alpha Chi Sigma).
Since the group formed, we have had three formal meetings that have lasted an hour and a half each. These meetings took place in the fourth floor computer lab of Wolpers Hall and Hudson Hall. In addition, we have had several short meetings before and after class and have had several small discusions among various members.
The main reason we chose this topic is that four out of the five group members are biochemistry majors, and we have a great interest in the topic of genetics. We wanted to apply this interest in our group project. We also wanted to show how organic chemistry is vital in the functions of life. The main strategy we employed in researching our topic was making use of the variety of Search engines on the Web. Each member of the group spent several hours a day looking up key words in the various search indexes. We also used our favorite chemistry-related web sites.
This is a great general information site
about biochemistry and
genetics. It also explains the relevance of organic chemistry to
genetics so that it is easy to understand.(be sure to check out
figures 1,2,& 4)
In order to understand genetics,
one must first look at the basics. The most important part of DNA are the
nucleotides. This link will give you a good understanding of what a
nucleotide
is.
The DNA sequence is composed of
various chains of nucleotides. The most important thing to understand is
that each nucleotide is an ORGANIC MOLECULE. Four of the five nucleotides
are adenine
,cytosine
,guanine
, and thymine.
Click on the four links to see the actual orgainc structure of each. (Can
you come up with their IUPAC nomenclature?)
This is a site that has many movies of Organic
Molecules being formed. The movie of most relvence to our group
project is the DNA molecule coming together with Hydrogen bonding. The
images and movies were created by Dr. Yue-Ling Wong. (If you
have time, check out the protein.)
Our last link shows the final
stage of protein
synthesis. This is one of the main functions of DNA. This movie may
take a few minuites to download but it is well worth the wait.
I think our group worked very well together. We really only had two major problems. The first was finding a time we could meet. A lot of the research our group did for this project was done separately. Our schedules conflicted too much for us to meet more frequently, so we would gather information and web sites whenever we had time and combine everything we found during our three meetings. The second problem we had was deciding on a topic. After we had narrowed it down, we were able to find plenty of sites on the web (even though it took several hours to sift through the keyword search results for relevant ones). Another benefit of this project, outside of organic chemistry, is that the group took the time to learn HTML code.
Most of the group already knew each other and lived in close proximity. Therefore, we really didn't create any interactions that did not already exist. Most of the people in the group agreed that they would like to do something like this again. We felt accessing the various web sites and creating our own home page was a good learning experience (and, MAYBE, even a little bit fun).
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