Bio220 Guide to material
Below are questions designed to help you learn the voluminous material we cover in Bio220.
Many of the questions are open-ended, and this is by design. The point of providing these
questions is not to “lower the bar” and encourage you to put in the minimum effort required to
earn a good grade. Rather, the point is to help ensure that you focus on the material that I feel is
the most important.
This list is not all-inclusive and it certainly is not a list of exam questions. Indeed, the exam will
have questions that ask you to synthesize material from different parts of the course. I hope,
however, that this list does help you to organize the course material in a way that permits
efficient studying.
Finally, the number of questions in each section is not indicative of the relative importance of the
various sections. At least 70% of the points on the exam will be drawn from the Developmental
Biology portion of the course.
1. Cell-cell signaling and communication is extremely important in physiology and development.
 What cellular components (organelles, categories of proteins, etc.) are involved in
manufacturing and secreting a protein hormone from the cell? What are the roles of the
organelles involved?
 How might two adjacent cells (i.e., in physical contact) interact with and communicate
with each other? What structures would be involved in these interactions and what would
their specific functions be?
2. The endomembrane system is one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic cell structure.
 What are the advantages of the endomembrane systems of eukaryotic cells? What sorts
of activities does the system permit?
 How did endosymbiotic organelles arise during evolution? Describe the evidence that
either supports or refutes the current theory for their evolution.
3. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the plasma membrane for the life of the cell.
 Of what is the plasma membrane composed?
 How do the physical characteristics (e.g., hydrophobic or hydrophilic interactions,
charge, etc.) of the components affect their location within the plasma membrane and
their function?
 How does the plasma membrane regulate what enters or exits the cell? Do different types
of molecules interact with or cross the plasma membrane in different ways?
 Does the cell have to expend ATP to move substances across the plasma membrane?
What factors affect the probability that a substance will move across the plasma
membrane?
4. Questions related to development
 With respect to the events involved in reproduction, are there any similarities between the
style of a flower and the fallopian tubes of a female mammal?
 In what ways are fertilization in animals and plants similar? Different?
 If the acrosome reaction in the sperm of a sea urchin failed to occur, would fertilization
result if the sperm encountered an egg? Why or why not?
 What are the similarities and difference among the different types of blocks to
polyspermy?
 What is the significance of the gray crescent?
 You discover a new species of animal that has large, very yolky eggs. What type of
cleavage do you predict the newly fertilized eggs of this species will exhibit?
 Describe the transplantation experiment of Spemann (and Mangold). Do you agree with
their interpretation of the results that the dorsal lip of the blastopore plays a role in body
axis determination? Why or why not?
 In what ways do Henson’s node and the dorsal lip of the blastopore play similar roles
during development?
 How are the body segments of embryos of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster,
determined during embryogenesis?
 What are homeotic genes? How do their functions differ from the functions of master
regulatory genes?
 How is pattern formation in flowers similar to pattern formation in animal development?
 Is the following statement correct? Why or why not?
“All evolutionary changes require mutations in genes.”