Plant compounds make up many of the derived medicines, poisons, and generally useful molecules used in the world today and for much of human history. While we may have learned to produce several of them synthetically as technology has advanced, the original knowledge on their properties and how to use them came from nature. Even […]
You never know when what at first seemed like an innocuous bit of research will turn into the next big tool to help prevent or mitigate the symptoms of a major disease. Coincidental discoveries like that happen all the time and small parts of nature can turn out to have applications we never would have […]
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is how the saying goes. But does that have to be true? A hammer can actually be a quite versatile instrument and, with some insight and ingenuity, be put to tasks that would previously have been thought outside of its purview. A hammer […]
The past five or so years has been a bit of a roller-coaster for any field that dabbles in genetics. The advancements the scientific community has made in such a short time frame are nothing less than extraordinary and things only seem to be accelerating from here on out. And the single piece of technology […]
Pathogens are a broad field of research. To many, different species and even kingdoms of pathogens must be treated with separate hands, while others feel they are similar enough as to be dealt with together. Bacteria and viruses make up the bulk of this argument and, as with many things, the true answer appears to […]
The methods available to treat bacterial infections are many. But among those with any real and lasting effectiveness, their usage is limited. Antibiotics were once the Holy Grail of medicine to deal with devastating diseases that wiped out entire populations. With them, these suffering conditions were almost entirely wiped out and the populace began to […]
As genetic sequencing technologies have become cheaper and more plentiful, scientists researching the history of life on Earth have found it that much easier to learn about the answers to the many mysteries that still lay unresolved. A major piece of the puzzle involves the emergence of plant life onto land and out of the […]
Disease research has a lot of safeguards built in, requirements that must be reached before proper human treatment can be started. While it is true that sometimes these conditions are far more onerous than is fair or essential, they do in a general sense help pave the road for effective human medicine. That is why […]
Interactions between hosts and their pathogens are numerous and come in so many forms that we continue to categorize them to this day. A unique example often seen in insects is the capability known as polyphenism, where two or more different phenotypes, or physical traits, can emerge from the same genome. This is commonly seen […]
Once upon a time, scientists thought genetics and genomes were fairly straightforward. A gene encodes a protein and that protein carries out the actions that cause physical, metabolic effects and even phenotypic effects visible to others. It was a direct and simple system, a functional way for something formed through natural selection to be built. […]
