Put your name here
BIOL 347 General Physiology Lab ­p; Dr Stark
Midterm Exam ­p; Wednesday March 5, 2008
Short answer

1. You know about "publish or perish" and you want to compare two of your biology professors with respect to how much their articles have shown up in the reference sections of more recent articles. How do you do this?

cited reference search in Web of Science (formerly Science Citation Index)

2. Your assignment was to make a montage of several electrocardiogram and pulse monitor traces to post on the course web site, and you remember that your professor said he used Photoshop to make the one he showed you. When you're done, you pull down under "file" to "save" but you find you can only save it as a Photoshop file. Answer one of these: What do you need to do to make it so you can save it in many formats? Or What type of file do you want to save it in for web posting?

(1) flatten the layers, then you can save as tiff or jpg (2) jpg

3. Assume you're my TA and I'm computer illiterate while you're savvy. Tell me what feature of Excel is used to facilitate getting the mean and standard deviation of the midterm exam scores for the physiology lab class.

there are functions, so you just pick AVERAGE or STDEV and show the beginning and end of the list

4. Assume you're the research assistant for a biology professor who wants to publish a paper with you but does not know what you have been shown in lab. (S)he wants to try to get it accepted in the prestigious journal Science. If the Science editors reject it, (s)he wants it to be easy to rewrite for the Journal of Podunk Science. What do you tell the professor about how to prepare the references?

use a data base such as EndNote b/c all you have to do is select a different journal reference style

5. What is the name of the device you attach to your finger to detect your pulse?

plethysmograph

6. Tightly wound multiple layers of cell membrane constitute what part of the nervous system.

myelin

7. There is a decremental spread of the synaptic potential across the cell to (where?) where the all-or-none spike is generated.

8. Acetylcholine binds nicotinic receptors at what location in the sympathetic nervous system?

autonomic ganglia

9. When we recorded the electrocardiogram with the old fashioned pen-writer, we deliberately altered the noise and temporal aspects of the recording with (what?).

high pass filter (time constant) and low pass filter (filter)

10. An ion channel selective for what divalent cation detects the arrival of the action potential at the synaptic terminal and is essential for release of neurotransmitter?

calcium

11. A heater to melt glass and strong magnets to pull the melted glass was used to demonstrate the manufacture of (what?)

micropipette (electrode)

12. A stimulator is used to generate a voltage signal on an oscilloscope set to 0.5 Volts per cm. Suppose you want to make that signal look half as big. What would you change the setting to?

1 V/cm

13. For just a short while, the voltage on that oscilloscope could be seen. How did people make a more permanent record of their oscilloscope records.

photograph them

14. I showed you a palm sized voltmeter with a needle that showed the voltage. Why do neuroscientists need to use a penwriter, oscilloscope or computer to record action potentials instead?

to get voltage as a function of time on a fast time scale

15. In the frog nerve muscle preparation, how did they record twitches in the 1800's before they had electronics?

scratch a mark on paper with a stylus

16. In skeletal muscle (and heart muscle), most of the calcium needed to activate the sliding filaments comes from what location?

sarcoplasmic reticulum

17. These days, animal care committees are more stringent in approving animal use proposals. They might insist that rabbits be sacrificed using an overdose of narcotics. Why wouldn't this work for the gut smooth muscle motility lab?

drugs affect the autonomic control of motility

18. Why would they call a corpse found soon after the crime a "stiff?"

without ATP, myosin remains bouynd to actin

19. In earlier years, physiology lab students shocked their partners' forearms. A brief, small shock elicited a twitch. A high frequency burst of stimuli elicited a steady contraction called (what?).

tetanus

20. "Dark meat." What is this called with respect to the oxygen utilization in metabolism?

hemoglobin (in capillaries) and myoglobin and cytochrome (in muscle) are pigments

21. "White meat." What is this called with respect to the temporal characteristics of a contraction elicited by one action potential?

fast twitch

22. What detects the stretch of the quadriceps when the patellar ligament is tapped?

stretch receptor in muscle spindle

23. What is the protein that binds the calcium ions in muscle cells?

troponin

24. Why was it important to weigh some books and to put them onto the hand grip that fed into the iWorx?

to calibrate the hand dynamometer

25. Explain to your grandmother what you are seeing on the iWorx recording of muscle grip.

muscle cells generate electrical signals and we can record this activity across the skin

26. We demonstrated "small field tritanopia." Why was it called small field? Why was it called tritanopia? (two points)

small visual field, blue (blue-yellow) blindness

27. Normally we do not see the blood vessels in front of our retinas. Why should the tricks we used make it more likely that we would see this "Purkinje tree?"

we have "learned" to ignore them (habituation) but when the light does not come in the usual axial direction, they are suddenly visible

28. Normally, people do not report discriminating the plane of polarized light even though the macular pigments form a polarizing filter in front of the receptors. Why should the trick we used make it more likely that we would see this polarization?

the subtle amount of polarization is more obvious when it is ever-changing

29. A light source may or may not be flickering above the human flicker fusion frequency. How would you use your vision to tell if it is?

use any trick at ytour disposal to move the image og the light across your retina quickly

30. Why can't most normal people see UV (ultraviolet) light?

the lens absorbs it

31. You listen to two tuning forks simultaneously and hear beats. What was it you were demonstrating when you listened to one then the other?

the ability to discriminate frequencies that are just a few Hz apart

32. Answer either: (1) How does your eyeball "know" to stay upright when you tilt your head slightly? Or (2) How does it do that?

(1) vestibular system (2) 2 muscles/eye are used to rotate it

33. It was known for many decades that your visual reaction time was much slower than your auditory reaction time. Why is your vision so slow?

in phototransduction, cGMP must difuse from discs where it is made to the cell membrane where the channels are

34. A membrane on the white of your eye gets inflamed and you have pink eye. What is this membrane called?

conjunctiva

35. What's different about the people who can vs cannot taste PTC?

there is a gene for that bitter receptor, TT or Tt taste, tt do not

36. A friend who did not take the wonderful course asks why dogs' eyes sometimes appear to glow yellow and you reply "That's because of a layer called the (what?).

tapetum

37. Your acuity is so good that you can read the line of smaller print below the 20/20 line on the Snellen chart. Explain why we say your vision is 20/15.

you can see at 20 feet what most people see at 15 feet

38. Why can't you taste your food when you are very congested?

most of what we consider to be "taste" is olfaction, and odorants cannot get to the olfactory epithelium

39. What is it called when you fixate on a red dot then see green when you shift your gaze to a white background?

an afterimage

40. You dissect the front half of the eye from the back and you see ligaments holding the lens. Answer either (1) What muscle also connects to these ligaments? Or (2) What is the word for the function, poor in people over 40, of this muscle and these ligaments?

(1) ciliary (2) accomodation

41. Then you plop out the lens. Answer either (1) What is the name of the fluid filled compartment have you exposed? Or (2) What is the name of the disorder your eye care professional tests for if pressure builds up in this compartment?

(1) aqueous humor (2) glaucoma

42. What is wrong with your eye if you need an astigmatism correction in your prescription?

cornea is uneven in refracting

43. You are showing a friend an eye dissection when (s)he says "I hear that the middle of the retina is oxygen deprived. You've seen the blood vessels on the vitreal side of the retina. How do you show the blood vessels on the other side of the retina?

peel off the choroid and tapetum and there is the choriocapillaris, a faint tracing

44. If you had done poorly on the Rinne Test, where the tuning fork was moved from the bone to beside the ear, what would be specifically wrong with you (and what wouldn't)?

conduction (from the ear drum to the oval window), obviously your cochlea works

45. A figure in your book says "Taste buds are located on the dorsal surface of the tongue." Actually they are located on what structure (and that structure, your answer, in turn, is located on the surface of the tongue).

papillae

46. What do we mean when we say that the pancreas is mostly an exocrine gland?

in addition to endocrine function, it has a duct to the small intsetine for digestive enzyme (precursors)

47. The insulin that is released in the fed state favors the formation of what polymer in muscle?

glycogen

48. How would an overdose of insulin affect uptake of glucose into cells in the brain?

b/c there is less blood glucose, glucose uptake would be reduced

49. You just came down with diabetes but you don't know it yet. In the "pee" lab, the urinalysis strip is positive for glucose in your urine. Does your kidney still retrieve glucose that is filtered out of the body?

yes, but its transport capability is saturated

50. How is it that liver cell membranes become more permeable to glucose uptake in the fed state?

insulin mediates deployment of glucose transporter molecules to the membrane

51. We get a reading of 150 on the glucose meter. What are the units?

mg/dl

52. We inject "IP." Where does the injection fluid go?

into the intraperotineal cavity

53. How do you figure out how much anesthetic to give your mouse?

on the basis of weight

54. Relate how we determine electrical axis with Eindhoven's triangle.

we measure ECG waves from the different ECG "leads." with two wrists and an ankle, different leads come from different connections of positive, negative and ground electrodes

55. How does the electrical signal get from one heart muscle cell to another?

by gap junctions

56. Right before the ventricles contract, the arterial blood pressure is (what?).

the diastolic level

57. How does the typical resting pulse relate to the rate sinoatrial pacemaker cells would have if there were no autonomic input.

slower b/c of parasympathetic

58. (a) A change in the action potential of (what cell type?) would explain the shorter QRS to T time during exertion?

ventricular myocardial spike gets shorter

58 (b) How should your recording have looked? (Please draw two consecutive EKGs before and after exercise.)

show the ECGs closer togetner and tthe QRS and T closer

59. What is the status of the valves between the atria and the ventricles during diastole?

they are open

60. Which cells automatically depolarize during diastole?

pacemaker cells in the SA (sinoatrial) node (also in the AV node)

61. What event marks the end of isovolumic ventricular contraction?

the opening of the valves to the arteries (aortic and pulmonary semilunar valves)

62. Your systolic blood pressure is 120. What are the units?

mmHg

63. How much blood flows from the left ventricle to the aorta during diastole?

none

64. (a) Why can you hear sounds from the artery inside your elbow as the cuff pressure is lowered from the systolic to the diastolic pressure?

turbulent blood flow

64. (b) What is the name of this artery?

brachial

65. Why did they decide that the mean arterial blood pressure should be closer to the diastolic than to the systolic pressure?

you are in diastole more time than you are in systole

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