Soybean fields at Applethorpe Farm

Temperature Tolerance: Recent Efforts In Biotechnology

Temperature is something we worry about in our lives all the time. What temperature is it outside so you know what to wear and what are the conditions going to be in coming days or weeks. Farmers have to worry about this as well, as excessive periods of heat or cold snaps can prove damaging […]

Nematoda Gadus Morhua Fish MArket Atlantic Canada

Parasitic Worms Use Toxic Venom To Liquefy Insects

Parasitic worms seem to be a topic being covered here more often as of late, but that’s likely because they are just as involved in every aspect of our lives as bacteria are. Understanding how these worms function can bring new insights into human health, agriculture, and more. In one of our prior articles, we […]

Dictyostelium discoideum 43

Bacteria-Eating Amoeba Effective Against Antibiotic-Resistant Biofilms

Biofilms are an ingenious evolutionary creation, but one that gives us humans a lot of trouble in fighting bacteria. Film Development Originally, there was no real need for bacteria to clump together in most situations, due to their free-floating water environment. But land surfaces (and debris in the waters) enabled them to form extracellular matrixes […]

Staphylococcus aureus VISA 2

New Modified Antibodies Enable Fight Against MRSA And Other Bacteria

The human immune system is usually a tireless worker that does its best to keep us protected from pathogen invasion. But even for all of its complexity, there are certain parts of it that fail hard when confronted. Enemy Identification When it comes to combating bacteria wishing to harm us, one of the first actions […]

A juvenile root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne incognita) penetrates a tomato root - USDA-ARS

Genetic Protection For Plants Against Parasitic Worm Attack

Parasitic worms aren’t only a threat to animal or insects, plants have to deal with them as well. The Worms Attack While these sorts of worms may not outright kill their target plants, they can significantly damage them by causing root and nutrient pathways, like the xylem and phloem, to become deformed from the worms […]

Rat primary cortical neuron culture, deconvolved z-stack overlay (30614937102)

CRISPR-Cas9 Allows Photographic Imaging Of Genes In Live Cells

Imaging cellular processes has always been difficult. With biotechnology, we have been able to use marker genes like green fluorescent protein (GFP) to follow the activities of individual cells, but that is a far cry from interior mechanisms within a cell. Since the dawn of the field, technology has advanced so that fluorescent microscopy has […]

Roots by cesarpb

Plants Use Root Structures To ‘Listen’ And Search For Water

Water is important for life. It is a primary source of structure and function in all life forms, even including viruses that use it as interstitial fluid for containing their viral genome. For organisms that produce their own complex compounds, commonly known as autotrophs, water remains the main source of outside material they need to […]

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New Stem Cell Method Allows Development Of Extra-Embryonic Tissues

Stem cells were often thought of as the holy grail of biological discovery after they were uncovered by Ernest McCulloch and James Till in 1963. A method to produce cells that can form into any part of the body, potentially providing new organs and prevent horrible disorders like leukemia. Of course, things didn’t really turn […]

Expl0717 - Flickr - NOAA Photo Library

RNA Editing Allows Cephalopods To Alter Genetic Instructions

The central dogma of molecular biology and genetics is pretty straightforward. You take DNA, then you transcribe the desired gene into RNA (usually mRNA) and, once outside of the nucleus, you translate that RNA using ribosomes into amino acids that then form proteins. Those proteins then do the actual function that their original genetic encoding […]

Diverse e Coli

Genetically Engineered Inflammation-Sensing Bacteria Made With Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is complicated. When you’re building biological systems from the ground up, how could it not be? But the results are almost always something amazing, a real revolutionary accomplishment that wouldn’t be possible with any other field of science. The only other field that comes close is nanotechnology and mechanical systems are still somewhat […]