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You gotta go check out the Protein Data Bank. It's pretty much *the* source for information on proteins. They have a "protein of the month" that they write about and explain all sorts of cool things about. <https://www.rcsb.org/\>

If you can get your hands on a copy buy "The machinery of Life" <https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-David-S-Goodsell/dp/0387982736\> a book that's a really clear but accurate and detailed explanation of how proteins are made in cells, how DNA and proteins are related, and a lot of other concepts explained very clearly. It's like all the cool parts of what you learn in a college level biochemistry course, but way easier to understand and with less tests and math!

Also check out the game "Fold It" <https://fold.it/portal/\>. It's a game where you fold and design proteins. If you like that try to install a protein design software like Rosetta <https://www.rosettacommons.org/\>.

Lots of cities have shared bio-hacker-spaces where you can use their equipment and meet other people. When I was your age I got involved in robotics by getting involved with a local community group. I learned a lot and people helped me out and By the time I graduated from high-school I had designed robot parts that were sold around the world by the top robot part manufacturer in the US. You can do anything when you are your age and you are interested in something.

The number one thing I recommend is to keep being curious, spend every free moment you can exploring, and when you cant figure out how to do something (because you don't know how, don't have the money, or don't have the equipment) don't let that stop you. Just politely ask people for help and you might not always get a reply but often you will.

Read a lot, learn a lot, watch documentaries, and when you have an idea for a protein you could make email some college professors at whatever colleges are around you and ask if they can help you accomplish your goal. It's pretty likely they will help you.

​

PS: Here are some great places to start:

Gene design competition for students: http://2008.igem.org/Main_Page

Universal genes (instructions for making proteins) https://biobricks.org/freegenes/

(Pipetting robot) https://opentrons.com

(The best Protein/Biochem lectures) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfsuDfui0oU

(Protein design program) https://els.comotion.uw.edu/express_license_technologies/rosetta

(Home made biology tools) https://pipettejockey.com/

(VR biology viewer) https://store.steampowered.com/app/493430/Nanome/

Your best bet is to contact the instructor(s) for any classes you're interested in to see if there will be lectures covering material you are uncomfortable with; it would be helpful to be specific (for example, if you're okay with diagrams of organs and tissues but aren't comfortable with images of the actual thing).

That being said, in my experience (4th year graduate student in molecular biology) few classes have been especially graphic. Off the top of my head, the only ones to be careful of are anatomy/physiology (duh :) ) and general bio as there is usually at least one dissection in the lab section (which you might be able to opt out of).

Another option is to explore your interest in biology and evolution outside of coursework. There are quite a few great books out there that discuss the field without being gory. I personally recommend “The Beak of the Finch”, which discusses the decades-long research project tracking finch evolution in the Galapagos. http://www.amazon.com/The-Beak-Finch-Story-Evolution/dp/067973337X

Good luck!

Sure.

If evolution is of interest to you (and if you have interest in the intersection between theology and science), Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller explores both sides of the debate and debunks many common misconceptions about evolution. I first read it in a college biology topics course.

If you like the topic of 'creationist attempts to dispute or disrupt the teaching of evolution in the classroom', Summer of the Gods, about the Scopes Monkey Trial, is a great book (although not explicitly about science).

You may find The Selfish Gene by Dawkins worth a read.

Books by Mary Roach can be fun; I've read Stiff and enjoyed it, and Packing for Mars was pretty good as well.

I have heard good things about The Emperor of All Maladies, though I haven't read it myself.

Our Stolen Future, about contamination of the environment by artificially produced estrogen and estrogen analogs, is dated but interesting.

The Discovery of Insulin by Bliss is a great story about how science happens and how scientific discovery occurs, and it lays out what may be the most important discovery in medical science during the 20th century.

Were those types of books what you were looking for?

Take lots of classes and keep learning. When I was in high school, things like ecology and wildlife biology were appealing to me because I understood what plants, animals, and ecosystems were, but I had no idea what a ribosome or a micro-RNA really were. I found that the more I learned about molecular and cell biology, the more fascinated I became by these tiny little machines that power every living thing. I started taking neuroscience classes because brains are cool; I ended up getting a PhD in neuroscience with a very cellular/molecular focus to my research (my whole dissertation was on one gene/protein that can cause a rare human genetic disorder).

Get some experience working in a lab. Until you've spent time in that environment it's hard to know whether you'll like it. And as others have mentioned, population biology and evolutionary genetics can combine some aspects of field work and molecular lab work, so those might be areas to investigate.

Want some books? Try The Beak of the Finch and Time, Love, Memory. The first is focused on experimental validation of evolutionary theory (involving lots of field work), the second is about the history of behavioral genetics in fruit flies. Both were assigned or suggested reading in my college biology classes.

Good luck, and stay curious!

This isn't exactly what you're looking for (it has much more to do with pollination and fertilization than it does germination), but the hammer orchid has a structure that looks like a certain insect. The orchid has evolved a part (the labellum) to look uncannily similar to the female Thynnid wasp (at least to the males). When the male Thynnid wasp tries to copulate with the labellum, the orchid swings the two backward, smashing the wasp against pollen packets, which stick to it. The wasp then flies away and is tricked again by a second orchid. This time, however, the pollen from the first flower enters the stigma of the second and fertilizes it.

I'm just a high school student, so professionals out there please correct me if I'm wrong. I apologize profusely for any errors or misconceptions.

1. Here is the Wikipedia page where I got most of my information.
   
   
2. Here is a Youtube video demonstrating the orchid/wasp interaction and offering some more details.
   
   
3. And here is a link to Richard Dawkins' book The Greatest Show on Earth which devotes a good amount of time to discussing how the hammer orchid evolved and is also a very good book about evolution itself.
   
   Hope this helps!
   
   

I wouldn't be worried about taking bio classes as an undergrad. It'd be more useful to take introductory chemistry, organic chemistry, and some biochemistry, but even that isn't necessary. Any competent biology graduate program should bring you up to speed pretty quickly. (This textbook is pretty good, too.)

This wiki page is a good place to start to see the ways in which a math background can be applied to biological problems.

You might want to check out /r/askacademia, /r/gradschool, and /r/gradadmissions for tips on applying to programs as an international student (if I'm reading your intentions correctly).

You also might find this collection of links on efficient study habits helpful.

This isn't heavily science-y and a bit journalized, but I really enjoyed Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadaver's by Mary Roach. I also like Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. There's a lot of overlap with what he teaches at his UChicago Eco & Evo course. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is also wonderful, but will likely make you angry. Yet another interesting read is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Here's an article from Nature Genetics that may be of interest: A common JAK2 haplotype confers susceptibility to
myeloproliferative neoplasms. If it's too technical, this may be a useful resource.

As for blood and DNA, this information is so ubiquitous I'm not sure if it's worth looking for specific books or articles. The Wikipedia pages look pretty good. However, given these topics, I would like to recommend an excellent book Emperor of All Maladies: Biography of Cancer. As a cancer biologist, I consider it an excellent book about modern cancer biology and history of molecular medicine. It does a great job introducing blood diseases and role of molecular genetics. Hope this helps!

There are a whole lot of good answers here, but if you want some further reading, I recommend Why Evolution is True by University of Chicago evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne. It answers all of your questions in depth and more.

Personally, I found this book to be superior to The Greatest Show on Earth, as I found it to be a little more straight-forward and no-frills, so to speak. It manages to pack in more information and provides, imo, more rock-solid lines of evidence while still being accessible to the lay-person. If your brother reads the whole book, he will no longer be a creationist.

edit: if I wasn't so poor right now I'd buy you a copy from Amazon. That's how strongly I feel that people with questions on evolution should read this book! :)

I know you asked for online sources, and you've been given some good ones, but if you can take this book I'd recommend it. Really easy to follow, lots of pictures, and comprehensive. Good luck in your exams!

I'm sure every subscriber here has already read it, but the top book has got to be The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Reading it really opened my mind to how evolution actually worked in a way that my teachers at school never had. Even if later on when I started learning about social insects I had to start questioning some of those ways of looking at an "individual".

Back on topic, I'd recommend Matt Ridley's Nature Via Nurture, Genome, and The Red Queen, as each are accessible yet still highly informative looks into various aspects of evolution.

For those interested in human evolution there's Y: The Descent of Men by Steve Jones and The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes.

All of those fall more under the category of books that should be read between high school and college if you are interested in studying Biology. Once you get to grad school level books might be a neat introduction to a topic, but any real learning would come from primary literature. I've read lots of fantastic papers but they start becoming so specialized that I would hesitate to put forward specific suggestions, because what might be fascinating to ecologists will probably be dire to molecular biologists. I know that as someone with a focus on zoology, most of the genetics papers I read left me more confused that enlightened.

I'll stick to recommending science communication books (those that don't require a deep background on biological concepts):

• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection - Charles Darwin, bonus points if you can get a 1st edition reprint (before his colleagues made him change a lot of important things); it is a must-read but it might need quite some time to truly understand it, it is a heavy read.
  
  
• A lot of people recommend the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but that one is one of his most controversial books and if you decide to read it, you should take everything with a pinch of salt; for Dawkins I prefer to recommend the Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and the Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Just beware of Dawkins, he's a little dogmatic in his approach.
  
  
• The Dialectical Biologist - Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin.
  
  
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn, this one will change forever your conception of science as a whole.
  
  
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley.
  
  
• Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, and the Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History - Stephen J. Gould.
  
  
• The Ghosts of Evolution: Non-sensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms - Connie Barlow.
  
  
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? - Frans de Waal, this one is about animal cognition but has an incredible underline of all the deficiencies and prejudges on science.
  
  
• Microbe Hunters - Paul de Kruif.
  
  
• Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, and What is Life? - Lynn Margulis.
  
  
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan.
  
  
• A Short Story of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson.
  
  ---
  
  For books that everyone studying biology ends up reading, my candidate would be Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, by Nelson & Cox but that's a textbook.

Why Evolution is True -Great intro to evolution

The Blind Watchmaker- Dawkins' best introduction to evolution book. If it intrigues you have a look at his other works.

Definitely watch this. One of the best and most simple lecture series on Evolution. By none other than Dawkins himself. Very basic in presentation and entertaining series:
Growing up in the Universe

Why dont you take a university class on Evolution? Or just take a bio 101 class which is going to teach evolution briefly in 1-2 lectures.

I just stumbled upon this course. Which is a evolution course at Yale Open Courses that you might want to check out:
http://oyc.yale.edu/ecology-and-evolutionary-biology/principles-of-evolution-ecology-and-behavior/

You could start with The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins. It's a pretty easy read and it covers a wide range of the current evidence for evolution across different fields of science.

After that, The Selfish Gene also by Dawkins, is awesome. In it, he talks about evolution from the perspective of a gene.

Both should be pretty layman-friendly. He certainly has a compelling way of delivering his arguments.

just some of my standard answers.


The Disappearing Spoon- yes, it's chemistry but I found it very interesting.


Abraham Lincoln's DNA- if you have a good background in genetics you might already know many of these stories. Read the table of contents first.


New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers- disease based biology. There is a follow up book if it turns out you like it.


Stiff- more than you wanted to know about dead bodies.


And by the same author but space based... Packing for Mars.

I hope these help... Cheers.

Just graduated in may with my BS in Biology. I used Essential Cell Biology by Alberts for my cell bio class. I'll be honest in saying across my 4 years in the major this was the best book. The illustrations and diagrams are incredible and the book is clear. The reviews speak for itself, as someone said below you can probably get it for free from a torrent.

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Cell-Biology-Bruce-Alberts/dp/0815341296

It probably would not be a bad idea to get some knowledge of basic biology. Biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics are probably the big three sub-disciplines you want to familiarize yourself with, but to do that you need to have a good idea of basic biology. Campell Biology is the textbook of choice for freshman biology. Molecular Biology of the Cell is a fantastic book for molecular and cellular biologists. I, unfortunately, don't know of any good books for synthetic biology itself, but these two can give you a start.

I recommend concepts of genetics to answer that question. Recently lend the pumpkin version from the uni library for my genetics exam. Lovely book :)

I just began reading Your Inner Fish recently. It's pretty great so far. Definitely a focus on shubins experience with paleontology, but he does go a fair bit into molecular genetics as well.

Can't really say much else until I finish it.

One of the standard general bio textbooks is Campbell Biology. Any edition is fine, but I think the 8th edition is the sweet spot for a balance between age and cost. I wasn't a very big fan of the genetics textbook that my university used, but I do remember the cell biology textbook being pretty approachable (Essential Cell Biology, $10 used).

Now that I'm at home I've looked at the bookshelf and would like to add:

Almost Human -- written by a primate researcher about her experiences studying baboons in the wild. I read this book several years ago and still think about it regularly. Lots of interesting lessons about primates and people in here.

The Emperor of all Maladies -- a history of cancer, won a Pulitzer for best non-fiction.

I think Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale is one of his best. It takes the traditional bacteria to human story of evolution and flips it on its head, escaping the sense of directed progress that so often occurs in evolutionary books. I would also second the suggestion for Shubin's Your Inner Fish.

I'm going to walk through what I think is important to know about transcription by Pol II in eukaryotes; it's similar but more complex that prokaryotes and the transcriptional mechanisms of Pol I and III are much less well understood.

First we often have a TATA box ~25bp from the transcriptional start site (TSS) where the complex of TFIID (the TF's stand for transcription factor) and TATA Binding Protein (TBP) recognize an available TATA box and bind to it.

Next a bunch of other general transcription factors arrange around the TSS and they recruit and stabilize the binding of Pol II. TFIIF then catalyzes the phosphorylation of the C-Terminal Domain (CTD) tail which causes Pol II to release from the general TFs and began transcription in the 3' -> 5' direction (thus generating transcripts in 5' - 3' orientation)

• At approximately the same time TFIIF & DNA Helicases pry open the double helix allowing Pol II to sort of just do it's thing and synthesize RNA transcripts from the DNA template.
  
  While the RNA transcript is being made capping proteins are recruited to add the 7-methylguanine cap to the 5' end of the new transcript (This serves to maintain stability and will later be a recognition site of proteins).
  
  Additionally RNA splicing also occurs (usually) before the RNA transcript is completely transcribed. A large nuclear riboprotein (complex of nuclear RNAs and protein) call the Spliceosome uses 2 trans esterification reactions to clip out the introns and link together the exons (this is another large story I would stick with knowing what I said unless you need to know a lot about RNA splicing)
  
  Pol II keeps elongating until it hits the stop signal in which case Pol II releases from the DNA and the RNA transcript is now ready for more precessing and then export from the nucleus.
  
  Once the transcript is released Poly-A polymerase (PAP) adds ~200 adenosine monophosphates to the 3' end which is important for recognition by poly-A binding proteins necessary for circularization of the transcript for translation.
  
  This is all taken from Alberts - I can send you a PDF of it if you'd like.
  
  
  Edit - forgot about poly adenylation

Does she like to read? There's lots of really good everyday reading genetics books, like this or this for example.

Yea just check it out. It might seem that way from the perspective of cell bio and undergrad bio, but even great papers of hardcore cell bio have mathematical models for differentiation, signaling networks, and such. Bioinformatics has plenty of examples with graph theory, linear algebra, optimization problems, error functions. Also check out charlestondance's post.
Here are some good books.

Math Bio II

Biological circuits/networks

If you interested in biology/cancer research, read The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I really is a fantastic read, even if you're not interested in cancer.

It's not a textbook, and perhaps it goes against your "not be popular science" stipulation, but The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an amazing book... genetics, cancer biology, medicine, some historical perspective of those fields, tied into one real-life family with its own deep story. I think you will find it awesome and accessible.

Rebecca Skloot's book about Henrietta Lacks is a really great read. Whole heartedly recommend reading it.

If you like The Hot Zone, you'll love The Coming Plague.

Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer. E. coli has played a huge role in how we understand life at the molecular level. This book is written for beginners and non-scientists so its pretty palatable for people not in the field.
http://www.amazon.com/Microcosm-Coli-New-Science-Life/dp/0307276864

One of my favorites, Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, puts evolution in a wonderful context. It focuses on the evolution of development and shows you just how related you are to all other animals.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of the more recent NYT bestsellers that is also a pretty good biology read. The Hot Zone is a classic, and although it is dated, it will probably regain some of its formal popularity due to the [current ebola outbreak] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_outbreak). I would recommend Creighton if you want a "fun" read, but his works are fictional, predictable, and often infuriatingly inaccurate.

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley was one of the best intro books on genes I've read and gives a huge framework for all of the concepts of evolution to act upon.

The Beak of the Finch is a pretty good read.

If it's modeling you're interested in, I found Uri Alon's Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits to be a good starting place

An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits seems like a popular choice. Does anyone here happen to know this one?

The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. Probably one of the best books that cover the research on the Galapagos finches.

Microcosm is an awesome book:
http://www.amazon.com/Microcosm-Coli-Science-Vintage/dp/0307276864

If you're a fan of cancer (phrasing!), I'd check out The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. A bit long at points but a pretty cool read

http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/dp/1439107955

If you have any interest in cancer at all - The Emperor of all Maladies is an amazing book. It's titled a "biography" of cancer and tells how scientific advances have changed how doctors/patients/society have dealt with cancer through history, and ultimately guides the reader towards a modern understanding of the disease. It sounds dry but really isn't - it's a compelling book, and I especially loved how the science wasn't "dumbed down".

The book mentioned in the video clip: Ghost of Evolution is well worth reading even if you don't choose this for your assignment.

The Coming Plague is a good read.

If you're looking for another good read on evolution, I highly highly suggest The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.

The Beak of the Finch is a great non-textbook about evolution to read. Evolutionary Analysis by Freeman and Herron is the text I used in class.

Courses:

Take population genetics and computational biology. Population genetics focuses on dynamics of allele frequencies in different populations. Computational biology is anything from simulating networks of biochemical reactions to identifying patterns in DNA using hidden markov models.


Books:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Systems-Biology-Mathematical-Computational/dp/1584886420/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299531700&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Biological-Sequence-Analysis-Probabilistic-Proteins/dp/0521629713/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299531747&sr=1-1

The two canonical molecular bio texts are "Alberts" (Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts, et al) and Lodish (Molecular Cell Biology by Lodish et al).

These may not be specific enough if you want in-depth info on a particular area, but they'll get you started on just about anything you want to know.

If you want to read a whole book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is pretty much all about this, with a few ethical/political viewpoints thrown in. I've read it. It is a bit dull for me but does give the relevant background.

​

Your inner fish.

Read this.