Health Professionsbiology
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Our immune systems are comprised of dozens of different types of cells, antibodies, cascades, and more. This is often why immunology is such a daunting subject for so many students.
The autonomic nervous system is a division of the peripheral nervous system that mediates non-voluntary control of many of the basic functions of the body, such as heart rate, breathing, and digestion. It is made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which have opposing functions that help to regulate the body depending on the ...
Long paragraphs. Confusing graphs. Convoluted protein names. If this all sounds a bit too familiar, you’re probably thinking of the Biology/Biochemistry section on the MCAT. Even as a Biochemistry major, I still found this as one of the more difficult sections on the MCAT, so do not panic if you feel like you’re not making any progress – you are ...
When geneticists want to see how closely related two genes are, they have two main ways of doing so: linkage analysis and association mapping.
Hearts are pretty cool, and so are developing fetuses. Unfortunately for the student preparing for the MCAT, they’re also both pretty complicated, and fetal circulation differs from adult circulation in three main structures. In the next couple paragraphs, I’m going to break down these structures with one rule. If you’re not familiar with adult ...
The female reproductive system can at times feel like a difficult jumble of hormones that all seem to be related, but fluctuate in unpredictable ways. To make sense of the particularities of the female reproductive system, especially for exams like the MCAT, it is important to not only know what hormones are involved, but also to understand what ...
Meiosis is one of those processes that we all learned about in high school biology as a deceptively simple concept. You take the diploid cell, divide it twice, and it becomes four haploid gametes that are each capable of participating in fertilization. Easy, right?
What is the pituitary gland? Even though the pituitary gland is about the size of a pea, it plays a very important role in regulating a lot of our body’s endocrine functions. Located in an area known as the sella turcica at the base of the brain and suspended from the hypothalamus by a stalk, the pituitary gland consists of two parts: the ...