AT Bio Students Create Geologic Time Scale

The students in Advanced Topics Molecular Biology started the year off taking a deep dive into evolution and understanding the history of our planet and how life has changed and evolved over time. According to Paige Bailey ’24, the class created a Geologic Time Scale, which is a visual representation of the history of life on Earth. “This system was originally created by scientists to establish a chronological order of events on Earth, and our model intends to convey the vast gaps in time between significant periods of change,” she wrote. “The full length of our timeline represents 4.6 billion years, with 3 meter representing 1 billion years.” The class created this timeline and gathered information from National Geographic.

 

Students then moved on to learning about how microbes change the climate, how genes are selected and how populations change. This unit of study will culminate in students extracting their own DNA, doing PCR and gel electrophoresis on a particular portion of their genome and then comparing their genotypes to world populations.