Unit 4 Review - Homeostasis

Hi. It's Mr. Andersen and welcome to the Unit 4 review. In this review I'm going to talk about homeostasis. Homeostasis at the level of the body. So how do we keep our temperature constant on the inside if we're endothermic. Or homeostasis at the level of population or even an ecosystems. So it's a pretty diverse unit. And so I'll try to tie it all together. So basically before we start let's talk about what a feedback loop is. A feedback loop is when I'm taking and gathering information from the environment and then I'm changing my behavior based on that. And so basically if you see a sign like this and it says that my current speed is 38, well, I better slow down. And let's say it says that my speed is 18, well then I better speed up. And so I'm responding to that feedback that I'm getting from, in this case the speed sign. Now feedback loops essentially come in two different flavors. We've got negative feedback loops and positive feedback loops. And which one is most popular? For sure it's going to be the negative feedback loop. So how does a negative feedback loop work? Well let's say that my temperature were to increase. So let's say I were to get an increase in temperature, what's going to happen? Well I'm going to start to sweat. I''m going to start to vasodilate. And that's going to cool it down. Eventually my temperature goes down. If it goes too far down then I'm going to start to shiver. Maybe goosebumps. And maybe I'm going to vasoconstrict. So hold that body temperature close to my body. And so that's a negative feedback loop. And basically you know it's a negative feedback loop when we dance back and forth around a set point. So it may go above that. It may go below that. But we're trying to stay right around that one set point. And so almost all feedback loops, in living systems, are going to be negative feedback loops. Positive feedback loops occur when we want to go in one direction away from a set point. So if I see the speed limit as a challenge, like if I'm going 38. Now I'm going to go 58. Now I'm going to go 98, well that's a positive feedback loop. Example. This is an apple here. It's going to give off ethylene once it's ripe which is going to pick up other apples which are now going to produce ethylene. So we're going to even have more ethylene. And pretty soon we have so much ethylene that the whole tree turns red at once. And so another example of that might be childbirth. Where the head of the baby on the *** creates contractions. Which puts more pressure on the ***. And so we really only have positive feedback loops when we want to go in one direction as quickly and as really as possible. Okay. So now let's define a couple of other terms. And those are behavioral and physiological response. So what we do. If we do and have a behavioral response, what that refers to is the whole of the organism. A physiological response is going to be a response within the body. And so example. When it gets colder and colder and colder some organisms, like a humming bird will undergo torpor. Some will undergo a form of hibernation and some will be true hibernators. And so that's a behavioral response. The whole organism is responding to that change. In this case to the temperature. Now a true hibernator you could pick them up and knock them on a table, and they wouldn't even wake up. So they're really out of it. But it's a behavioral response. Or let's say the temperature gets cold in the northern hemisphere, I could fly to the southern hemisphere. Or migrate. And so migration is another behavioral response. I could just go back and forth as the climate changes. Or excuse me, as the weather changes. But again since the whole organisms is doing it, we call that behavioral. Physiological would be for example this runner here starts to get hotter and so it's going to start to sweat and vasodilate. So that would be a physiological response. Let's talk about the important ones that you need to know in AP Biology. And those are going to be, we'll start with the blood glucose. What happens with the blood glucose level? Remember the way I remember it is by B I and G A. And so basically, if the blood glucose level increases, so if it goes up, the beta cells of the pancreas are going to secrete insulin. That tells the cells, hey, take in more glucose. It allows that glucose to get into the cell. That's going to lower the blood glucose. And it's eventually going to go down to the set point which is around 90 - 100 milligrams per milliliter, per 100 milliliters. And so then what happens if it goes to low? So if it goes too low the blood glucose, that's going to stimulate the alpha cells, the A down here to secrete glucagon. And glucagon is basically going to tell your liver to breakdown glycogen and release the glucose. And so the glycogen, which is a polysaccharide in the liver is now going to breakdown to glucose. And that's going to increase the blood calcium, blood glucose level up to a set point. Again a thing I forgot to mention out here is that we could take blood glucose and store it as glycogen in the liver. That's another thing that's going to be a response to insulin. Let's try another one. Thermoregulation. So we sense that in the hypothalamus which is in a portion of the brain right above your mouth. And so basically what happens, if the temperature goes up, that's going to stimulate our body to create sweat. To vasodilate. So the capillaries get broader. It brings more heat towards the surface of the skin. And that's going to drop our body temperature. If it goes too low, then it's going to activate those capillaries to vasoconstrict, pull the body temperature close to the body. We're going to shiver. Maybe we're going to get goosebumps as we try to hold our hair up on end. And that's going to raise the temperature. Now what is this? It's a feedback loop. What type? It's a negative feedback loop because we're trying to stay as close to that core body temperature as we possibly can. Let's go to osmoregulation, because we do that as well. So what's osmoregulation? That's basically keeping the osmolarity in our blood the same. So right here we're looking at an organ called the kidney. And the kidney does essentially two things. One thing it does is it filters the blood. And the second thing is it regulates osmolarity. So it osmoregulates. I'm running out of room. So let's look at some of the parts of it. So if we look at this functional unit of the kidney, basically blood is going to flow in this direction. It's eventually going to enter into the glomerulus, where it goes to a dead end. And essentially the small little bits are going to be filtered out. Once it gets filtered out it enters into the filtrate. And that's going to eventually on our way down the loop of Henle and through the collecting duct. And it's eventually going to go into the bladder and be on its way. So we filtered out some of the small things. But we may want to reabsorb some of those and secrete some that we don't want. And so it does this job of filtering the blood. But the other thing that it does is it osmoregulates. And so if you ever notice that your urine will change color from really a yellow to really really clear, well that's as a result of your collecting duct. So basically what we're doing is we're deciding do we have enough water inside our body? If so, then we can let some of that H2O go. If we don't have enough of that water, then we're going to keep that water. So we can regulate how much, how permeable this is to water. And so we can osmoregulate. Okay next thing I want to talk about is biotic and abiotic factors. Biotic means living factors. Abiotic are going to be non living factors. So let's say we reintroduce the wolf into Yellowstone Park. That would clearly be a biotic factor. Let's say that carbon dioxide levels on the planet are increasing leading to global warming, that would be an abiotic factor. Let's say we're looking at how the population of snowshoe hares is going to effect the lynx population. That clearly would be responding to biotic factors. Let's try this one. We've got, if we ever have a surface and we have water flowing over that surface, bacteria will create something called a biofilm. So they'd be responding abiotic factors in order to maintain homeostasis. Okay. Homeostasis is also going to reflect evolution. And so if we've got a worm and a earthworm and a lion. And they all essentially have the same method for getting rid of nitrogenous waste. It's essentially a filtrate material moving in and then filtering off the smaller material. Well that suggests that this was a problem that was solved and it's just continued to be solved in the same way over time. And so homeostasis shows this homologous structure. Or this ability to excrete waste. If we look at something like getting oxygen into our body, well, if you're in water and you're on land, you're facing different constraints. And so if you are in the water, basically it's really moist which is great for absorbing oxygen, but there's not a lot of oxygen there. And so the evolution of the gill with its countercurrent exchange works efficiently there. As organisms eventually went from fish to amphibians and eventually to reptiles, we moved on to land. That just didn't cut it anymore. Because now we had this problem of a moist environment that we had to bring with us. We couldn't use that anymore. We had the advantage of all of this oxygen, and so the gills simply don't work anymore. And so now we had a split. So we've got the split to the gills and a split to the lungs. And so that shows the homeostasis or that bifurcations of that homeostatic mechanism shows evolution as well. Just to different constraints. Now sometimes we'll have huge disruptions. And what that can do is it can disrupt homeostasis. Example, brown tree snake was introduced into Guam and essentially wiped out all of these bird species. That's because it had evolved to have a homeostasis that was reflective of the organisms that lived there at that time. Example. Physiological disruption could be decrease in the amount of water can lead to dehydration and some really severe consequences as a result. Next thing I want to talk about is plant and animal defenses. Remember in plant and animal defense, it's different between plants and animals in that plants show what's called non-specific defense. That means that if you're invading a plant, they'll essentially destroy the cells and then harden the cells around it so they can fight an infection. But it doesn't matter what that is. It doesn't matter what the invader is. They're going to have the same response. This non-specific response. We have non-specific response as well. It's called skin. It's called macrophages that eat anything that get past that skin layer. But the interesting thing that we have, when I'm talking about we I mean mammals, is that we have a specific response as well. And so the way that that works is that we've got, let me grab a pen, we've got these macrophages that will eat the material when it comes in and then present that to the surface. And so what does that mean? An antigen is an invader. And we essentially have an infinite number of antibodies that our body normally has. So we've got a bunch of cells, we call these B lymphocytes. Each of them have different antibodies on its surface. And we literally have almost an infinite number of shapes at the end of these antibodies. And so we're infected by an organism, we can basically find the one where there's a perfect fit between the antigen and the antibody. And then we simply produce a lot of those B lymphocytes. And so the way we do animal defense remember is to sense the shape. T helper cell sits right in the middle. It is going to transmit that shape to the B cells so we can make more antibodies and more memory B cells. So we don't succumb to that same infection in the future. But we also make killer T cells so we can target cells that have been infected already. Next thing as far as development goes, there are three big terms on here that I'd like you to understand, or have a good remembrance of. And that would be differentiation. So if we start up here. Basically when a cell starts as a stem cell, it hasn't decided what kind of a cell it's going to become. But when it becomes a red blood cell or a neuron or a typical just, we could say this is an epithelial cell. How does it do that? Well it does that by basically surpressing certain genes. And so if it is a neural cell for example there are going to be all these genes that make a neural cell. Or a neuron. All the other bits of that chromosome are essentially going to *** up. And so they're methylated. And so they can't function. And so once a cell has decided what cell it's going to become, then it has differentiated. And this is kind of a one way boat. You don't go back from a cell to a stem cell. How do cells figure out which cell they're going to become? Well, they're secreting these tissue specific proteins. And so when you have a bunch of stem cells together, they're communicating to the cells around them telling them, hey, this is the cell I'm going to become. So we call this differentiation and cell growth. But what happens if a cell dies? That process is called apoptosis. And that's just as important. And so it's not only the formation of the cells that make this embryo, but it's the death of the cells between the fingers that forms those fingers. And apoptosis is really important in development over all. We've got a set of genes that control that. One other thing remember that we talked about was the hox genes and how the hox genes but body parts in their right spot. And hox genes found in fruit flies, mice and us are essentially the same thing. Suggests that they're homologous. How do we sense our environment? Well that is through, if we're a plant, through phototropism. Essentially a plant is going to grow towards the light. And the way it does that is the auxin, which is that plant hormone is going to move in the stem away from the light. So it's going to move in this direction. And that's going to cause the cells on the dark side to move towards the light. So that's day to day response. Photoperiodism is when a plant using phytochromes is figuring out how much night time are we having. So they can figure out essentially the season. Now we respond to our environment as well. We use what are called circadian rhythms. And so that's essentially our pineal gland secreting melatonin. And so we can kind of tell what time of the day it is. So right now it's almost 2:00. And so I start to get sleepy in the afternoon. Quorum sensing remember is used by bacteria. It's a way to respond to each other and their environment and make sense of their environment. And then the last thing that I want to leave you with is this idea of how did all this come to be? How did we get all of these organisms and ecosystems and things responding to their environment? That's essentially through natural selection. In other words, how does a plant know that it's a perfect time of the year to flower using photoperiodism? Well they didn't just figure that out. There were a bunch of those that flowered here. Bunch of those that flowered here. These ones flowered too late. And they didn't make it. These ones flowered too early and they didn't make it. So we have this perfect bell shaped curve. And so a bower bird figuring out this beautiful bower to attract a female is simply going to be selected for. The better it's selected through *** selection, the better that bower is going to become. And it's fun to speculate. Like, how did pollination come to be? How did that first bee transfer pollen from that first flower? Well it was probably an accident. But it gave advantage to that. And through natural selection we were able to develop that mechanism. And so that's homeostasis. I know it's all over the place, but it's really important. And I hope that's helpful.