Understanding Depressants, Narcotics, and Genetic Engineering
Depressants and Narcotics
Depressants: reduce activity and promote relaxation. Small doses can produce euphoria. Abuse causes damage to the central nervous system. Examples include sedatives, anxiolytics, alcohol, and inhalants.
Narcotics: reduce central nervous system activity and relieve pain. Examples include opioids, morphine, and heroin.
Common Health Conditions
Stress: the body’s response to problems, causing physical and psychological changes that can severely affect health.
Alzheimer’s: a process of neuron degeneration, leading to memory loss and other cognitive impairments.
Diabetes: a disease characterized by chronic hyperglycemia.
Thrombus: a blood clot that forms in an artery or vein. Thrombosis can lead to the formation of an emboli.
Aneurysms: localized dilation of an artery or vein due to degeneration of the vessel wall.
Schizophrenia: a mental disorder that affects thinking and emotions, altering the state of health.
Mycosis: an infection in humans or animals caused by a fungus or other organism (superficial, subcutaneous, or systemic).
Infections
Protozoa
Some protozoa cause diseases such as malaria and toxoplasmosis. Malaria: caused by the Plasmodium parasite, which affects red blood cells and is transmitted by mosquito bites (symptoms include fever and chills).
Bacterial Infections
Bacterial flora is abundant and mostly beneficial. However, some bacteria produce toxins that cause disease. Examples include:
- Tuberculosis: caused by Koch’s bacilli, transmitted through the air, and can cause pulmonary and bone lesions.
- Enteritis: intestinal toxins that affect the epithelium, causing vomiting and diarrhea, often due to poor hygiene.
- Meningococcal Meningitis: inflammation of the meninges (spinal cord membranes), affecting children and young adults, causing high fever, spots, head and neck pain, and can be fatal.
- Pneumonia: a pulmonary infectious disease, sometimes of avian origin.
- Tetanus: a severe bacteremia caused by bacteria in the soil that target wounds. Bacterial exotoxins affect nerve fibers, reaching the central nervous system and causing muscle contractions.
Eating Disorders
Anorexia: loss of appetite leading to malnutrition.
Bulimia: excessive food intake followed by vomiting.
Recombinant DNA Technology
Recombinant DNA: techniques that allow the manipulation of DNA (cutting, isolating, pasting, reproducing, and sequencing DNA fragments). It involves the union of DNA segments from different origins.
Restriction Enzymes: cellular enzymes synthesized by bacteria to protect their DNA from invasive DNA. They act as chemical scissors that cut DNA into fragments. Using the same restriction enzyme, DNA from two separate sources can be cut, and the fragments can be joined using DNA ligases to form a recombinant DNA molecule.
DNA Fragment Analysis: once restriction enzymes cut DNA, fragments of different sizes can be separated and analyzed using techniques like agarose gel electrophoresis.
Hybridization Using DNA Probes: a natural phenomenon and a fundamental technique in recombinant DNA technology. Hybridization is the process where two single-stranded DNA molecules with complementary base sequences come together to form a double-stranded DNA molecule. To analyze genes, biochips are used, which are glass slides with microscopic cells containing a small fragment of single-stranded DNA that acts as a probe for a particular gene. This technique is used to detect mutated genes that cause diseases, control gene expression in cancer cell lines, diagnose infectious diseases, and customize treatments.
Cloning: the production of genetically identical copies through asexual reproduction. A clone is a DNA fragment that has been copied billions of times. Cloning requires the introduction of the DNA fragment into a carrier molecule called a vector.
DNA Amplification: tiny amounts of DNA can be copied or amplified many times without the need for cloning, using a technique called polymerase chain reaction.
DNA Sequencing: determining the sequence of nucleotides in a DNA fragment. This allows us to know the sequence of thousands of genes and genomes of many organisms, from prokaryotes to humans.