Reflection

Last week, almost all the papers we talked about looked at different living conditions for marine invertebrates and how that influences gene expression or gene regulation. Different conditions we talked about were captivity, salinity levels, and temperature stress. Elevated thermal stress, lowered salinity, and captivity all elevated some stress related genes for all invertebrates. In particular, it seemed that organisms already living in stressful conditions had pre-adapted to their environment, as evidenced by a higher base level of stress gene activation than their unadapted counterparts. I learned what a long non-coding RNA is for the first time in my life, and I finally feel like I understand PCA graphs, to a certain extent.