Drought continues to be a primary driver of famine and crop loss around the world, with the accompanied water shortages not only affecting food production, but also drinking water availability. It is predicted that, by 2025, over two and a half billion people will be facing those sort of water shortages, especially as the effects […]
Specificity and efficiency in targeting is one of the hallmark aims of any CRISPR system. The ability to edit a genome is useless without the capability to target a particular sequence and reliably alter it. Thus, work has been perpetually ongoing in the hunt to find better CRISPR systems or to even design one from […]
Recent events shed a light on what we possibly face in the future, as hurricanes and other weather events become more severe due to the increased energy capacity of the atmosphere from greenhouse gas influx. The colloquial term for this process is climate change. And scientists are hard at work on finding ways to mitigate […]
Decoding the impact of genetic manipulation is a convoluted task. When it comes to investigating multi-layered diseases like Parkinson’s, it is fully expected that a whole host of genes in sequence or applied in simultaneity are used to promote onset of the disease. The process of figuring out which genes are involved or, conversely, which […]
Being one of the earliest focused upon diseases for CRISPR to treat other than retinitis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy has seen a lot of scientific effort be put into finding a cure or at least a palliative treatment to restore some amount of strength. Previous attempts have involved various types of viral vectors to help remove […]
Ethnobotany is one of those fields that encompasses more than just itself. It is larger than the sum of its parts. Connected to the wider field of ethnobiology, it relates to all of its other sister fields, like ethnoentomology, ethnozoology, and ethnomycology. And discussing just those misses out on the various other culture specific fields […]
The field of embryology continues to be one with more mysteries than answers. Since it is difficult in many countries around the world to work directly with human embryos, animal models are often the best we can do. To a certain extent, stem cells allow us to at least observe the earliest stages of multicellular […]
Neurodegenerative disease research has long been focused on understanding the underlying genes and molecules involved in the breakdown of mental function. But it is a multi-faceted process, involving some of the most complicated cell types in the human body. The main focal point has been on determining how the diseases progress and what can be […]
The specificity found within the mechanisms of the CRISPR system can be both a boon and a bane. Thanks to things like the PAM sequence, CRISPR-Cas9 has found itself as a useful tool to accurately target desired gene sequences at an unparalleled level. No other gene editing technology can really come close to matching the […]
Biofuels and biomass have, over the past few years, been a highly researched area as a way to replace petroleum-based fuel sources. The expansion of biofuel production over the previous decades has not been without its own problems and hitches. A main issue with current biofuel production is that it is largely done by using […]
