. Provide information that explains why both of the organisms below, chipmunk and black mould growing on half a tomato, could be classified in either the Fungi or Animal kingdom, including a conclusion to your work stating which kingdoms each organism belong to and why this is so.
Answers
Answer:
It may seem strange, but the ability to die on command is one of the most important features of living cells. In fact, no plant or animal could grow, develop, or even survive without it. Every single cell in your body has a genetic program built into it that will cause the cell to self-destruct if the program gets switched on. This pre-programmed self-destruction – a kind of cellular suicide – is called apoptosis.
Apoptosis plays a key role in several processes. One of them is general housekeeping: when cells get old or damaged, they need to be cleared out to make way for new ones. Sometimes it’s a part of development: for example, the reason we don’t have webbed fingers and toes is because the cells in between them are programmed to die off while we’re still in the womb. And other times, it’s a form of self-defense: if a toxic chemical or a virus gets into a cell, the cell will destroy itself rather than create a safe haven for the invader to grow and spread.
When the attack is small in scale, this can save the organism’s life. But if too many cells are affected, the organism can suffer severe damage. That’s what happens when tomatoes get black mold: a chemical from the mold triggers apoptosis in the tomato cells, killing them off in large numbers. By the time you pick the fruit, the entire tomato just collapses. Gilchrist and his colleagues have genetically engineered the tomatoes so that they don’t respond to that particular chemical. As a result, the apoptosis never happens, and the tomato stays healthy and edible.
Scientists would like to apply this kind of knowledge to human diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and AIDS, which trick cells into self-destructing prematurely. You might think they would try to stop apoptosis in all our cells all the time, but that would be deadly. In fact, the exact reason why cancer cells are so dangerous is because they won’t die; instead, they grow and multiply like weeds and take over the body. Some researchers are actually trying to treat cancer by triggering apoptosis in the renegade tumor cells.