Totally Wired

Totally wired is our next Unit, on neuromuscular physiology. On Blackboard, there is a workbook, a set of objectives, a practical, and some more animations. No quiz yet.

What's on Blackboard

Objectives and workbooks are available on Blackboard now for skeleton & muscle (Straining & training: straining for skeleton, training for muscle).
There is a quiz for skeleton/straining, but not yet for muscle/training.
Your test will be on Skin and Skeleton only. This Friday 12th June, 9-10am.

Bagging up the sea and carrying it around

Just in case you have not found us on Blackboard and elluminate yet, here's what you should be doing!

Introduction:
It is common knowledge that life began in the sea and is therefore adapted to the sea, and a common enough idea that we now carry the sea round inside us, one way or another, to allow our bodies to work. It is a very useful idea and allows us insight into the way our mechanics work. We are slung on bones, like a building on its timber frame, but we are much more than that. We are also 'plastic bags of salty water, all bound up to make a hydrostatic skeleton'. Our tissues form that hydrostatic skeleton, especially our connective tissue.

Tasks:

• Find us on Blackboard: all those enrolled on the course should have access. Let me know if you haven't, by comment here or email in to massage therapy. If you have, get on there and say hello!
• Listen to Elluminate if you were not there. Instructions as to how to find the recording are on Blackboard, but a big hint is that the recording comes up on the page for Friday 13th, not Tuesday 17th! Check that you can find our next one (Tues 24th, it should 'go live' at 11am and you can then click on it to enter the meeting), so that you are ready to join in.
• Reading:
  

I'd like us to be moving on to looking at tissues, with a heavy emphasis on connective tissues and, in particular, fascia.

• Try to read Chapter 3 in Job's Body. Its an old book, but has a lot of basic stuff written in a way that makes sense to massage. Chapter 3 is called Connective Tissue and contains various sections and subsections:

• Water Bags - orientates you, but can be skimmed if you find its familiar stuff

• The Main Ingredients - 4 sections that I'd really like you to read

• Hydrogen Bonding - 2 sections that I'd really like you to read

• The Supportive Network - skip if you haven't got time or it looks complicated, although the bit called Hydrostatic pressure is fun, even if it doesn't sound like it from the title, easy to understand and a useful analogy.

• Connective Tissue as Retort - skip unless you have time and interest.
• Connective Tissue as Organ - read if you have time & interest.

• Theraputic Manipulation of Connective Tissue - relevant to practise, but much less so to bioscience, so read if you have time & interest.

• Remind yourself about the tissues you studied in Bioscience 2. Especially connective tissue. Some of the key issues are: what is the ground substance & is it gel or sol, what kind of cells are there, what kinds of fibres, and how well is it supplied with blood?

• Try looking up fascia, in relation to massage therapy, or in relation to anatomy & physiology. Share any sites you find useful, use the discussion board. But don't drown in the information stream, there's a lot out there!

Resources:
Juhan, Deane. 1987. Job's Body. Station Hill Press, New York.
Marieb (as usual)
Wikipedia (try fascia, and adhesion)
Other web sites?

Moving to Blackboard

Due to popular request (well that's one thing to call it anyway), this blog teaching course is now moving to a private space on Blackboard. So don't watch this space too hard!

"Workbook" outline

Just so you have this if you can't get onto Blackboard: the outline I showed in class last Friday. Not really a workbook, but I'll work on that request in future. Contains new stuff about tissues.

Keeping it together (cell mechanics and cell mechanisms)

The Plasma membrane: (pp66-70: text finishes on p69, diagrams on p70).

How does the membrane keep it together?

Side box: how is a cell membrane like a tent canvas?

A. The membrane itself

· Function

o Bag for keeping things in

§ What things?

o Immigration/emigration control

§ List of molecules that go in/out

§ List of types of ‘holes’ in membrane

B. Membrane junctions

·

Side box: getting things in and out of the tent

Function

· Types

o D

o T

o G

Cytoskeleton (pp90-95: text finishes on p95, but ignore table 3.3 on pp94-5)

(Picture of red blood cells)

What holds the cell membrane in shape?

C. Tubules and filaments

· Microtubules

o

Side box: holding the tent up, poles and ropes

Structure

o Function

· Microfilaments

o Structure

o Function

· Intermediate filaments

o Structure

o

Side box: moving round in the tent, flapping the tent walls, swimming tents?

Function

D. Movement

· Moving organelles around in the cell

· Cilia and flagella movements

· Moving the cell membrane

· Examples from cell division

Migrating cells (pp111, 112, 111, 68, 83-84)

How do cells know where they are/should be?

Side box: where is my tent in this campsite/country?

E. Where am I?

· Superficial and deep

· Inside, outside and in-between

· Head-tail, tummy-back, proximal-distal

Side box: taking my tent down & going home, or putting up more tents

Should I be here?

· Apoptosis

· Hyperplasia & wound healing

· Atrophy

F. The extracellular matrix

· Body fluids

·

Side box: what’s the countryside like outside, can I move my tent easily?

Extracellular matrix

o Loose connective tissue

§ Areolar

§ Adipose

§ Reticular

o Dense regular connective tissue

§ Tendons & ligaments

§ Fascia

o Dense irregular connective tissue

§ Cartilage

· Hyaline

· Elastic

· Fibrocartilage

§ Bone

§ (Blood)

G. Proteins in the cellular membrane

· Peripheral proteins

· Intercellular joining (mooring your boat)

· Cell to cell recognition (got your swipe card?)

o glycoproteins

· Attachment to cytoskeleton & the extracellular matrix (tethering your cow!)

H. The glycocalyx (sugar coating)

· CAMs

· Function of CAMs

o ‘Velcro’

o Movement in wound repair

o Indicating wound site

o Tension monitors

o Signalling

· Signals

o Physical (touch)

Chemical

Electrical

o Chemical

o Electrical

Massage Therapy: Connection & relevance to Massage Therapy?

Keeping it together (cell mechanics and cell mechanisms)

Introduction

Our first unit is to be on the topic of ‘keeping it together’, a concept that I’m sure will be troubling some of you by now! But it’s not just, how are we going to keep it together doing this course? The title also refers to how the human body ‘keeps itself together’. So we will explore biochemistry, organelles, cell structure, tissues and possibly the skin, with a view to working out what it is that stops us from being a load of chemical soup, with no bodily organisation.

I know what you did last year, so we will be building on that. (If you have forgotten it, you need to revise a bit! Start in Chapter 3.) The “what to do” below explains first, what to read and then what to make notes on. You are trying to pick out what is important for holding things together. There are hints on how to make notes, many of them being questions. It may be useful to think how structure helps or allows function. For example, a rope is useful for pulling my baby cow along, but it is not much use to push her away when she is a bit too full of ‘attitude’. You can’t push with a rope. What features of a rope are there, that allow pulling but not pushing? Finally, don’t make your notes too long! I don’t want an essay on every sub-topic. What we want is an essay on the whole topic (Keeping it together), written by lots of people.

If you can add to your notes (in any form) by finding useful stuff from other sources, that would be awesome (rewardably awesome – the more awesome you are, the more marks you end up with!). We need to know where it came from and you need to judge its academic validity. Finally, if you are really smart, you might like to think how this might relate to massage therapy.

I want everyone to do all the reading, but I don’t mind at all if you divide up the note taking among yourselves*, so that not everyone makes notes on every topic. What I will want to see is that everyone has made notes on something. You can post your notes as comments to this blog post. If you can’t manage that, see if someone else in the class can help you do it. At the very least, bring your notes to our first session.

*I can’t divide it up myself because you haven’t introduced yourselves yet!

OK, here is part 1 of “keeping it together”, the biochemical, organelle and cellular part:

What to do

Step 1: Read “The Plasma membrane: Structure” (pp66-70: text finishes on p69, diagrams on p70).

Notes: How does the membrane keep it together?

A. The membrane itself.

The plasma membrane holds things inside the cell and also keeps things out. What are the ‘things’? How does it keep them in/out (what is it made of and how does that work)? It does let some ‘things’ pass through, how does it do that (what kinds of ‘holes’ does it have)? Note which diagrams/pictures are useful. Here is an idea – imagine the membrane is like the nylon part of a tent, with all the zips, air flaps, etc, etc, does that help at all?

B. Membrane junctions

The junctions hold the cells together. How do they do that? What types of junction are there and what does each type specialise in? Try thinking of what they are trying to allow/prevent. Does the name tell you anything (look up desmo in the front of the textbook)? OK, so we don’t usually put our tents that close to each other, but suppose that’s all we had to live in, would we make junctions?

Step 2: Look at Fig 3.9 (p74). Ignore the bit about why the cells have gone like that (that’s revision!), and just think of the cell membrane shape. It’s not just a balloon, is it? Something is holding a shape. What holds a tent in shape?

Step 3: Jump to the Cytoskeleton. Read “Cytoskeleton” and “Cellular extensions” (pp90-95: text finishes on p95, but ignore table 3.3 on pp94-5.

Notes: How does the cytoskeleton keep it together?

C. Tubules and filaments

Make notes on the types that exist. What structural features do they have and how does that help them do what they are specialised for? We are talking protein biochemistry here! (If you need to revise, go back to Chapter 2, pp50-52, structural levels of proteins, Fibrous and globular proteins, Protein denaturation.) What are the ‘subunits’? Does that tent analogy help with this?

D. Movement

Some things move along microtubules, how? Microtubules can make cilia and flagella move, how? Microfilaments make the cell membrane move, how (have a look back at fig 3.3 p67)? Can you see, now, how that red blood cell changes shape? If so, try to explain it!

Step 4: This one goes all over the place, but it’s really about cells moving around. Read “Developmental aspects of cells” (p111), but stop at the bit about cell aging (p112), unless you are interested. Then read “Extracellular materials” (p111). Then jump all the way back to Fig 3.4, p68. Make sure you understand what all those proteins (purple blobs) are doing. With all that on board, read “Cell environment interactions” pp83-84.

Notes: How do cells know where they are/should be?

E. Make notes on when cells might move about, and when they might need to know who they should be next-door to.

F. Make notes on what they may need to move through (what surrounds cells – what are the various possibilities)?

G. Make notes on how cells recognise each other. You need to talk about glycoproteins. Find a picture of one?

H. Make notes on the glycocalyx. How do CAMs and membrane receptors help the cells to hold together in a way that is organised? How do membrane receptors help cells know ‘what to do’ at the right time?

Step 5: Congratulate yourselves. We are on track!

Resources

Marieb, E., & Hoehn, K. (2007). Human anatomy & physiology (7th ed.). San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings.

Wikipedia

You Tube

Other text books….

Other places online….

The Hitchhikers' guide to Biosci 3

Introduction

Every time I write a course (I wrote much of the Blackboard material that you used in semester 2 of year 1), I end up getting the quality education. I learn far more than anyone who just does the course! What can we do about this? Well, the obvious thing would be for you to write the course…

“Oh, but…” I hear you cry. Well, of course, if you could write the course, would you need to do the course? OK, don’t panic, I didn’t mean without help or structure. Last year, you had a load of resources on Blackboard. It would be good if we could all work towards having something like that. We will all work together to create your own resource, to revise from. Now, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and ‘we’ includes me. I probably have access to some pictures/materials that you don’t. I will certainly be providing direction, what to study, what to include, how far to go, and I can tidy things up (although one of you may prove to be good at this). We will talk about this more when we meet up in March (9-12am Friday 13^th, I think!).

I need you to start using the blog. Last year, I think people got lost and couldn’t find things they needed to read/do. So I am going to try and hang everything on the course blog. Later we can pick off the bits we want and put them together how we want. This means that you need to find the blog (would you be reading this if you hadn’t?), read it regularly, and do what it says. This will include reading, researching, and posting responses in the form of ‘comments’. I need to know that you can all do this. For reading, I will need to guide you within the textbook. The page numbers are very similar in the 7th and 6th editions, but as you go through, the 7th edition gets 1 or 2 pages ahead. By the very end it might be 5 pages ahead of the 6th edition. So I'd like to know which edition most people bought.

What to do

Step 1: Find the blog for Bioscience 3 and read it. Put it into your RSS feed.

Step 2: Find out how to add comments. Add a comment to the “Hello and Welcome” post. Introduce yourself by giving your name (I can tick off that you’ve done this) and telling us something about you.

Step 3: Add a comment to this post, telling me which edition of the text book you have – probably either 6^th or 7th (if you don’t have a copy, tell me that and explain where you can get access to one, to read).

Resources

Marieb, E., & Hoehn, K. (2007). Human anatomy & physiology (7th ed.). San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings.