Output in

Earth and Life Science

Submitted to: Eddiely Teodoso Sayam Olvido

Submitted By: Ashley Kate Abarquez
(reaction paper)

PHOTOSYNTHESIS: LIGHT-DEPENDENT REACTION

Before we get into the details of the light-dependent reactions, let's step
back and get an overview of this remarkable energy-transforming process.

The light-dependent reactions use light energy to make two molecules

needed for the next stage of photosynthesis: the energy storage molecule
ATP and the reduced electron carrier NADPH. In plants, the light reactions
take place in the thylakoid membranes of organelles called chloroplasts.

Photosystems, large complexes of proteins and pigments (light-absorbing

molecules) that are optimized to harvest light, play a key role in the light
reactions. There are two types of photosystems: photosystem I (PSI) and
photosystem II (PSII).

Both photosystems contain many pigments that help collect light energy, as
well as a special pair of chlorophyll molecules found at the core (reaction
center) of the photosystem. The special pair of photosystem I is called P700,
while the special pair of photosystem II is called P680.
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PLANT AND ANIMAL REPRODUCTION

The International Symposium on the Mechanisms of Sexual Reproduction in

Animals and Plants was held in Nagoya, Japan, as a joint meeting of the second
Allo-authentication Meeting and the fifth International Symposium on the
Molecular and Cell Biology of Egg- and Embryo-Coats (MCBEEC), November 12–
16, 2012. This was the first international meeting where many plant and animal
reproductive biologists gathered and discussed their recent progress.
Approximately 160 participants met in Nagoya from all over the world, and most
of the oral presenters and several poster presenters contributed as authors of this
book of proceedings. Although there are several books covering plant self-
incompatibility and double-fertilization systems as well as animal fertilization, until
now there has been no book covering recent progress in almost all fields of plant
and animal fertilization.

This meeting was organized as part of the research project entitled “Elucidating
common mechanisms of allogeneic authentication: mechanisms of sexual
reproduc- tion shared by animals and plants” supported by a Grant-in-aid for
Scientific Research on Innovative Areas from MEXT, Japan. This project was
established because self-sterile mechanisms in primitive chordates (ascidians)
were found to be very similar to the self-incompatibility system in flowering plants
and also because GCS1, a sperm-side factor responsible for gamete fusion, exists
not only in plants but also in unicellular organisms and animals. These discoveries
led us to speculate that there must be many other common mechanisms or
molecules involved in sexual reproduction of animals and plants. We believe that
to stimulate discussion in this innovative area, it is very important to summarize
our current understanding of the mechanism of sexual reproduction. We hope
that this book will be useful for many scientists, particularly those in the field of
sexual reproduction—which we tenta- tively call “allo-authentication”—and in
intercellular communications.
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INHERITANCE
inheritance is necessary for evolutionary change. It describes how genes are passed from
one generation to the next. It might consequently initially seem surprising, then,
that geneticinheritance itself is rarely included in life history research. Instead,
assumptions are made about what is inherited, and what different patterns of
inheritance mean. The reason life history theorists finesse inheritance is that our
understanding of the genetic architecture of life histories is usually so rudimentary we
have very little idea about the role that genotypes at specific loci play (Falconer, 1960).
In this section, the author briefly considers the theoretical underpinnings that have led
to life history theorists treating inheritance in the way they do. The theory has arisen
from the way that inheritance is treated in population models.
Often the focus of life history research is on life history traits – for example, age-specific
body size, or age at first reproduction (Stearns, 1992). Stage structured and age–stage
structured models describe the life history of the group of individuals over which they
are parameterized – usually the entire population (Caswell, 2001). The models
dynamically iterate forwards the distribution of a character from one time step (usually
a month, or a year) to the next. In order for the approach to work, it is necessary
that phenotypic characters in adults are mapped to phenotypic characters in offspring
(Easterling et al., 2000; Coulson, 2012). This map is referred to as the inheritance
function. This function requires that traits are measured at different ages in the adult
and the offspring; models consequently capture the birth process. In many animal
studies, individuals with relatively large adult trait values often produce offspring with
relatively large offspring traits, and the inheritance function has a positive slope
(Coulson et al., 2010). Models such as these are termed integral projection models
(Easterling et al., 2000), and they are agnostic to the inheritance mechanism that the
inheritance function captures, and whether it is genetic, environmental, or both. These
population level models are usually analyzed at equilibrium, which means that
parameter values in the model remain constant with time. A consequence of this is that
the mean of the phenotype shows no temporal trend as no evolution occurs (Coulson et
al., 2010). Nonetheless, the models can be used to analyze evolutionary change through
the use of sensitivity analysis and by asking what happens to the life history if
parameters in the inheritance function, or in any other parts of the model, evolve?
As well as using models to study evolution over fixed time steps like the integral
projection models described above, population level models are also used to study
evolution on a per generation time step. The most widely used such model is the
breeders equation (Lande, 1979). Instead of iterating a distribution of a phenotypic
characterforward one fixed step, it iterates the mean of the character value forward by
one generation. The model is static, not dynamic.