1. ARE THESE ALL BEARS? WHICH ONES ARE MORE CLOSELY RELATED?

2. Evolutionary Family Trees phylogeny - the evolutionary history of a species comparative phylogeny - comparing two or more species and their evolutionary history bioinformatics – applying mathematics and computer sciences to analyze biological data (particularly molecular biology – ex. nucleic acids and proteins) You will use bioinformatic tools to analyze the evolutionary relationships among different animals.

3. rRNA Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) makes up part of ribosomes. Recall, ribosomes are where proteins are made and all cells have them. Some of the genes that make rRNA are found in mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from the mother because the sperm does not contribute its mitochondria to the egg. One of the rRNA mitochondrial genes in mammals is 12S rRNA. 12S rRNA is a very useful gene to study family trees.

4. How do genes help make family trees? Gene sequences (ex. ATGGCGTACCTTACGTT….) can be compared between different individuals as well as different species. The more similar the gene sequence, the more closely related to organisms are. The degree of similarity found between gene sequences is used to show how closely related organisms are and to show that relationship

5. What does the bear family tree look like? Answer the questions and turn into Mrs. Flick (see checklist) Use biology workbench to create a distance matrix and a phylogenic tree Use biology workbench to align the sequences of the different animals (identifies areas of similarity) Select the FASTA view for each sequence and import into biology workbench Find the 12s ribosome gene sequences for each animal at NCBI