Plants have been used for a lot of purposes over the years. Other than food and decoration, they have helped in creating clothing, lumber for construction, soaps and oils for showers, a huge variety of dyes for fabrics and other more artistic methods, and so much more. Now, researchers at Linköping University in Sweden have […]
Across the entire phylum of arthropods, there is something that unites almost all of them. Beyond their genetics and their physiology that places them within Arthropoda in the first place, there is yet another facet of their biology that is shared. And often not in a positive way. Your Actions Are Not Yours Wolbachia is […]
Contaminated drinking water is one of the main health concerns in the world, especially within developing countries. And the greatest contaminant that health officials have to deal with, which affects and slowly poisons over 100 million people around the world, is arsenic. A Worldwide Concern Groundwater pollution from arsenic is a serious problem and it’s […]
The Human Genome Project, a proposal to sequence the entirety of the human genome and all of its nucleotides, was completed in April of 2003. While there are still scientific debates on whether it properly completed all of the genome, there remains another part of the project that one can say for certain is not […]
When dealing with fungi, it is never just the organism itself that is the problem, but also the many mutualistic relationships it has in the soil. In some cases, those relationships are antagonistic and can be used against fungi that attack crops, such as by using specialized mycoviruses. But even in the cases where the […]
Another success of CRISPR-Cas9 has just been announced with the production of pigs that are likely resistant to one of the scourges of porcine husbandry, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS). This viral disease infects thousands of pigs worldwide and is highly fatal, especially for pregnant sows or young pigs. As for the industry itself, […]
The other day on Bioscription, we discussed the South Korean Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and their work with CRISPR-Cpf1 in soybeans. Today, the same organization has released a study on a new form of CRISPR-Cas9 that they isolated from Campylobacter jejuni. This resulted in the acronym CjCas9 for it. A Problem Of Size A […]
Would you like to eat broccoli year round and also increase harvests to twice a season? Well, that’s what researchers at the John Innes Centre in the UK are attempting to accomplish. This accomplishment builds on prior research on the inner workings of vernalisation, which is the process that induces crops to flower after experiencing […]
A popular and pressing issue currently in agriculture is the issue of bees and their fate in a modernizing world. Both for domesticated honey bees, who appear to be suffering from a combination of negative effects with a main combatant being the Varroa destructor mite slowly wearing down hives and destroying them, and wild bees, […]
Antibiotic resistance continues to be a growing problem in medicine. While overuse of antibiotics plays its role, the general fact of population and usage over time lends itself to the same outcome. Some resistance can be mitigated by use of multi-drug systems that make it mathematically impossible for any one bacteria to become resistant to […]
