Biology 2e is designed to cover the scope and sequence requirements of a typical two-semester biology course for science majors. The text provides comprehensive coverage of foundational research and core biology concepts through an evolutionary lens. Biology includes rich features that engage students in scientific inquiry, highlight careers in the biological sciences, and offer everyday applications. The book also includes various types of practice and homework questions that help students understand—and apply—key concepts. The 2nd edition has been revised to incorporate clearer, more current, and more dynamic explanations, while maintaining the same organization as the first edition. Art and illustrations have been substantially improved, and the textbook features additional assessments and related resources.

By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following:

Describe the different types of variation in a population
Explain why only natural selection can act upon heritable variation
Describe genetic drift and the bottleneck effect
Explain how each evolutionary force can influence a population's allele frequencies

This course explores the cognitive and neural processes that support attention, vision, language, motor control, navigation, and memory. It introduces basic neuroanatomy, functional imaging techniques, and behavioral measures of cognition, and discusses methods by which inferences about the brain bases of cognition are made. We consider evidence from patients with neurological diseases (Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Balint's syndrome, amnesia, and focal lesions from stroke) and from normal human participants.

Lectures and discussions explore the clinical, behavioral, and molecular aspects of brain aging processes in humans. Topics include: loss of memory and other cognitive abilitites in normal aging; neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Based on lectures, readings taken from the primary literature, and discussions. Students are expected to present topics based on their readings. One written mid-term test and one final examination. Alternate years.

Seminar covering topics of current interest in biology. Includes reading and analysis of research papers and student presentations. Contact Biology Education Office for topics. This course is one of many Advanced Undergraduate Seminars offered by the Biology Department at MIT. These seminars are tailored for students with an interest in using primary research literature to discuss and learn about current biological research in a highly interactive setting. The instructor for this course, Dr. Kosinski-Collins, is a member of the HHMI Education Group. Maintenance of the complex three-dimensional structure adopted by a protein in the cell is vital for function. Oftentimes, as a consequence of environmental stress, genetic mutation, and/or infection, the folded structure of a protein gets altered and multiple proteins stick and fall out of solution in a process known as aggregation. In many protein aggregation diseases, incorrectly folded proteins self-associate, forming fiber-like aggregates that cause brain cell death and dementia. In this course, the molecular and biochemical basis of the prion diseases, which include bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), Creutzfedt-Jakob disease and kuru will be examined. Also discussed are other classes of misfolding diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease. The proteins involved in all of these disorders and how the proteins' three dimensional structures change during the course of these afflictions is covered as well as why prions from certain species cannot infect animals from other species based on protein sequence and structure. The course will then address possible detection methods and therapies that are under development to treat some of the protein aggregation diseases.

This seminar provides a deeper understanding of the post-translational mechanisms evolved by eukaryotic cells to target proteins for degradation. Students learn how proteins are recognized and degraded by specific machinery (the proteasome) through their previous tagging with another small protein, ubiquitin. Additional topics include principles of ubiquitin-proteasome function, its control of the most important cellular pathways, and the implication of this system in different human diseases. Finally, speculation on the novel techniques that arose from an increased knowledge of the ubiquitin-proteosome system and current applications in the design of new pharmacological agents to battle disease is also covered.

How do scientists discover the basic biology underlying human diseases? Simple organisms such as baker's yeast, nematodes, fruit flies, zebrafish, mice and rats have allowed biologists to investigate disease at multiple levels, from molecules to behavior. In this course students will learn strategies of disease modeling by critically reading and discussing primary research articles. We will explore current models of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease, childhood genetic diseases such as Fragile X syndrome, as well as models of deafness and wound healing. Our goal will be to understand the strategies biologists use to build appropriate models of human disease and to appreciate both the power and limitations of using simple organisms to analyze human disease. This course is one of many Advanced Undergraduate Seminars offered by the Biology Department at MIT. These seminars are tailored for students with an interest in using primary research literature to discuss and learn about current biological research in a highly interactive setting. Many instructors of the Advanced Undergraduate Seminars are postdoctoral scientists with a strong interest in teaching.