Biology

The scientific method gives scientists a way to solve problems and explain natural events. Its development grew alongside new ideas in science during the European Renaissance. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Isaac Newton helped formalize the process. Although the method has changed over time, much of its basic framework is still used today.

The process begins with observation and a clear question. A scientist first notices a natural phenomenon and then asks why it happens. This...

Cell membrane transport and water balance help cells move materials in and out of the cytoplasm. Cell membranes are semipermeable, which means some molecules can pass through while others cannot. The phospholipid bilayer and its embedded proteins control this movement. Some of these proteins act as transport channels for ions and carbohydrates that could not cross on their own.

Cells stay small in part because of the surface-area to volume ratio. As a cell grows, its surface area does not keep...

Cells are the basic units of life, and their structures help explain how living things work. Cell theory says that every living organism is made of one or more cells, cells are the functional units of organisms, and new cells come from preexisting cells. Cells also share key features, including a plasma membrane, cytoplasm, DNA, and ribosomes.

The plasma membrane is a phospholipid bilayer that surrounds the cell. It separates the cell from its environment and controls what enters and leaves.

Biomolecules are the organic molecules that living things use for structure, energy, and heredity. They all have a carbon backbone and hydrogen atoms, and carbon can form four covalent bonds. That bonding flexibility lets carbon build chains, branches, rings, and other complex shapes. Biomolecules also commonly include oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur.

Small building blocks join together to make larger molecules. These units are called monomers. Two monomers can form a dimer through...

The circulatory system moves blood, oxygen, nutrients, and wastes through the body to support homeostasis. Homeostasis is the stable internal balance that organisms must maintain even when the outside environment changes. Physiology is the study of how body systems work, and the circulatory system is one of the key systems that helps keep internal conditions steady.

Body systems are built from cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems. Humans have 11 major organ systems, and they work together...

Mendelian genetics explains how traits move from parents to offspring. Gregor Mendel studied pea plants in 1865 and showed that many visible traits are controlled by two alleles, or gene versions, with one inherited from each parent. He also found that some alleles are dominant and others are recessive.

Mendel’s work was not widely accepted until 1900, and it took about 30 more years for Mendelian inheritance to fit into evolutionary theory. One reason for the delay was that real breeding...

DNA extraction, quantification, and cutting are key steps in many biology labs. Scientists use these methods to study genes, prepare DNA for testing, and compare fragments for analysis.

DNA isolation starts with a small sample, such as a leaf, hair follicles, or epithelial cells from the mouth collected with a saline solution. The first steps are cell harvesting, lysis, protein degradation, and DNA precipitation. Lysis breaks open the cell and nuclear membranes so the DNA can be released from...

Plasmid DNA transfer in bacteria helped launch modern genetic engineering. The idea traces back to Frederick Griffith’s work on pneumonia-causing Streptococcus pneumoniae in the early 20th century. He studied a rough, non-virulent R strain and a smooth, virulent S strain with a protective polysaccharide capsule. When he injected mice with heat-killed bacteria of either strain, the mice survived. But when heat-killed S-strain bacteria were mixed with live R-strain bacteria, the mice died, and...

Photosynthesis turns sunlight into chemical energy in the form of glucose. This process powers most life on Earth by helping autotrophs, or primary producers, make food. The glucose they make can provide quick energy or be stored as starch for later use. Consumers depend on these producers for energy.

Photosynthesis happens in many kinds of organisms. Cyanobacteria, some protists such as algae, and plants can all carry out this process. In eukaryotic cells, it takes place in the chloroplast.

Cellular respiration is the process cells use to release usable energy from biomolecules such as sugars and lipids. Living things need a steady energy supply for growth, repair, movement, defense, and reproduction. Cells use that energy mainly by converting adenosine diphosphate (ADP) to adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Autotrophs and heterotrophs get the molecules for respiration in different ways. Autotrophs, such as plants, algae, and photosynthetic and chemosynthetic bacteria, build...

Cell division is essential for growth, repair, and reproduction in living organisms. It lets single-celled organisms create a new organism and helps multicellular organisms make new cells for development and for replacing damaged cells. In multicellular species, cell division also makes reproductive cells needed for reproduction.

Before a cell divides, it must copy its genetic material and split it into two daughter cells. This process is called the cell cycle. Although the timing can vary...

Water movement in plants depends on transpiration and the vascular system. Plants must move water and dissolved nutrients from the roots to the leaves. They also exchange materials with the environment as part of normal life processes.

Vascular plants use bundles of tissues that run from the roots to the tips of the plant. Root hairs absorb water and nutrients, and osmosis moves water into the xylem, the main water-conducting tissue. Water then travels to the tallest parts of the plant and...

Enzymes are biological catalysts that help living things run biochemical reactions faster. They lower activation energy, which is the energy needed to start a reaction. Enzymes are not used up in the process, so they can keep working again and again. Most enzymes are proteins, although some ribonucleic acid molecules also have catalytic activity.

Each enzyme usually binds only one or a few specific substrates. This selectivity depends on the enzyme’s active site, which fits its substrate like...

Drosophila taxis behavior is a key part of animal behavior studies. The common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a widely used model organism in biology. It is easy to keep in small tubes, it has a short generation time of about two weeks, and males and females are easy to tell apart because males have black coloration toward the posterior and females have banded abdomens.

Scientists have used Drosophila for more than a century. Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students studied mutant flies in...

Food chain energy flow shows how energy moves through ecosystems from one organism to the next. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, so it can only change form or be passed along to another organism. When a cow grazes on grass or an osprey eats fish, energy moves to the consumer. Each transfer is part of a trophic level, and these links help explain how ecosystems stay balanced.

Primary producers sit at the base of the food chain. They are autotrophs, or self-feeding organisms, because they...

Biodiversity matters because it helps keep ecosystems healthy and stable. Biodiversity is the variety of living organisms in an ecosystem, and it can be measured at the genetic, species, community, and ecosystem levels. Ecologists often focus on species richness, which is the total number of different species in a local community. They also consider evenness, which describes how similar the abundances of those species are.

A community with many species is not always the most diverse if one...

Mass extinction is a major loss of species, and the fossil record shows how these events changed life on Earth. Fossils from different rock layers helped scientists see that life has a long history. In the early 19th century, that idea helped launch paleontology, the study of fossils and ancient life.

At first, many scientists did not fully accept that a species could disappear forever. They thought unknown organisms seen only in fossils might still live in unexplored places on Earth. By 1859,...

Island biogeography explains why species are found in some places and not others. It looks at how biotic factors, like competition and predation, and abiotic factors, like habitat size and distance, shape birth, death, immigration, and emigration rates. For a species to avoid local extinction, births and immigration must match or exceed deaths and emigration.

Edward O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur helped define this field in 1967 by studying isolated oceanic islands. Islands gave early...

Population ecology examines how a species population changes over time. A population is a group of individuals of the same species living in the same area at the same time. To persist, a population must grow or at least stay about the same size. Ecologists study birth rate, death rate, and age distribution to understand whether a population is increasing, declining, or at risk of extinction.

Population ecologists use models to predict how population size changes. Two simple models are...

Ecosystem health is measured by looking at how species, habitats, and nonliving conditions interact in the same area. An ecological community includes many populations that live together and affect one another. When biotic parts, or living parts, also interact with abiotic parts, or nonliving parts, they form an ecosystem. These systems can be very small, like microbes in the human digestive tract, or very large, like a forest linked by the carbon cycle.

Ecologists study ecosystem health...

Climate change affects Earth’s average temperature, sea level, and living things. Scientists distinguish climate from weather by time scale. Weather describes short-term conditions in one place, such as temperature and precipitation. Climate describes those same conditions over long periods, and global climate is measured using data from across the entire Earth.

Researchers track climate change with help from meteorology, geography, oceanography, and computer models. Much of this work focuses...

Hawk-dove strategy helps explain how animals compete and cooperate in populations. Organisms often face costs when they try to get food, shelter, or mates. Because of that, individuals can use different behavioral strategies to gain an advantage.

This is clear in polymorphic mating systems, where one sex, usually males, uses more than one mating strategy. For example, dominant male sea lions defend groups of females on the beach. Non-dominant males stay in or near the water and try to mate...

Patch use in optimal foraging explains how organisms balance food gain against the time and energy needed to search for it. Foraging is not limited to food. Animals also search for habitats, shelter, and mates. Each choice has costs and benefits. A resource provides a benefit, but finding and capturing it takes effort. Optimal Foraging Theory models how organisms reach the best balance between those costs and gains.

A key idea in this theory is that resources are often clumped into patches...

Mate competition and fitness traits shape how organisms choose partners and pass genes to the next generation. Evolutionary fitness depends on surviving and producing offspring, and sexual selection is a major part of that process. It creates pressure on traits used in courtship and mating, such as bright colors, ornamentation, and other features that help attract a mate. These traits can also create sexual dimorphism, which means males and females of the same species look different.

Sexual...

Eusociality is a highly organized form of animal social life. It includes division of labor, where different individuals take on different roles in the group. In these systems, some animals help others even when it comes at a cost to their own survival or reproduction. That self-sacrificing behavior is called altruism.

Early evolutionary biologists used to explain fitness only at the level of the individual. Observations of eusocial species, such as honeybees, challenged that idea. W. D.

Fitness and natural selection shape how traits spread through a population over time. Variation in inherited phenotypes gives evolution its raw material. When a trait is heritable and affects survival or reproduction, natural selection can change how common that trait becomes in later generations.

Fitness means reproductive success compared with others in the same population. A heritable trait that improves fitness is called an adaptation. Individuals with higher lifetime reproductive success...

Artificial selection, also called selective breeding, is the human choice of which plants or animals reproduce. It uses natural variation in a population to produce traits people want. Over many generations, this can create domesticated organisms that look very different from their wild ancestors.

Natural selection is a different process, but it helps explain how change happens in nature. In adaptive evolution, differences in traits can lead to differences in survival and reproductive success.

Hardy-Weinberg tests help scientists check whether a population is changing over time. Because evolution happens slowly and over large areas, researchers often use mathematical models to study it. These models use measurable data and computer simulations to predict how allele frequencies may shift across many generations.

The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium equation is one common model. It was developed independently in 1908 by G. H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg. The equation gives the expected...

DNA evidence helps scientists map evolutionary relationships between living things. Early classification began with Aristotle in the 4th century BC and was later improved during the Renaissance and by Carolus Linnaeus in the mid-1700s. These systems grouped species by physical similarity, such as the presence or absence of a backbone in vertebrates and invertebrates. Traits like a backbone are called synapomorphies, which are shared traits that likely came from a common ancestor.

Physical...

Plant adaptations for land life explain how plants moved from water to land and diversified over time. Kingdom Plantae first appeared about 410 million years ago, when green algae began transitioning from aquatic environments to dry land. That shift was difficult, but land offered more light, more carbon dioxide, and far less competition than crowded oceans.

Life on land forced plants to solve new problems. Aquatic plants can absorb water and nutrients directly from the surrounding liquid, use...

Kingdom Animalia includes a wide range of organisms that share a few basic traits. Most animals are multicellular eukaryotes that move, consume organic matter, and reproduce sexually. Even with those shared features, animals are extremely diverse because each species adapts to a different niche. A niche is the place, role, and set of interactions a species has with living and nonliving parts of its environment. Specialization helps species survive, reproduce, and reduce competition with others...

Bacteria and fungi are highly diverse organisms, and scientists identify them by looking at their structure, growth, and role in health. Some species help people, while others can cause disease, so learning how to tell them apart matters in biology and medicine.

Biological taxonomists group organisms by evolutionary relatedness. Life is divided into three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota. Bacteria belong to the domain Bacteria, which includes single-celled prokaryotes. Prokaryotic...