Niche--Biology

Palak Shah TA: Luca BIO 101 The niche is one of the most significant concepts in ecology. An organism's niche is how it makes a living: the important resources it needs to survive and its ways of obtaining those resources. Competition occurs when organisms in the same community look for the same limiting resource. This resource may be water, prey, nutrients, light, etc. Competition with members of the same species is intraspecific. Competition with individuals of different species is interspecific. Individuals experience both types of competition, but the relative importance of the two types of competition varies from population to population and species to species. Exploitation competition may cause the elimination of one species. For this to happen, one organism must require less of the limiting resource to survive. The dominant species must also reduce the quantity of that resource below some critical level where the other species would be unable to replace its numbers by reproduction. Exploitation will not always cause the elimination of one species. They may coexist with a decrease in their potential for growth. Neutralism is the most common type of interspecific interaction. Neither population affects one another nor are any interactions that do occur indirect or incidental. Amensalism is when one species suffers and the other interacting species experiences no

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Should a DNA profile be taken at birth?

A DNA profile should be taken from each newborn baby. "DNA profiling (also called DNA testing, DNA typing, or genetic fingerprinting) is a technique employed by forensic scientists to assist in the identification of individuals on the basis of their respective DNA profiles."1 Within a clinical context DNA profiling has many potential human uses; immigration applications, determining adopted siblings, paternity testing and of course criminal justice. Limitations of the procedure include; it can only give statistical probable data, it is ethically wrong according to some experts, this then reliable source will be easy to plant in crime scenes and of course minorities may abuse DNA manipulation.2 DNA profiling at its current state is a tool used to gather circumstantial evidence, within the forensic and healthcare fields. Without scientific thought this process is a revelation but many ethical issues including human rights have been foreshadowed. Should a DNA profile be taken from each newborn baby? Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the cornerstone for human genic makeup, which serves as an instruction manual and blueprint for everything in your body. The process of electrophoresis is used to gather 'non coding DNA' (areas of short tandem repeats, STRs) using restricting enzymes. There are two common methods of separation and detection, capillary electrophoresis and gel

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