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. […]
Learning about plant immune systems is one of the first steps toward finding ways to improve their defenses against pathogen attack. The difficulty is that, much like the immune system found in animals, the processes involved are highly complex and also completely different from other kingdoms of life. Finding out about the human immune system […]
When it comes to growing niche products, any sort of harm to the plants could prove disastrous to the overall yield itself. This is especially so if that plant is only grown in certain regions due to soil and weather requirements. That is the case for the subject of chocolate, a billion dollar industry that […]
There are a number of errors that can happen when an organism develops from an embryo to an adult. A single missing cell or a cell out of place can have catastrophic results for the matured individual. Even a slightly altered rate of cell division at such an early stage is more likely to cause […]
The process of beer-making is complicated. The brewing process has an array of steps that need to be followed fairly precisely or you risk ruining the flavor of your concoction. A general description of the process is that brewer’s yeast, usually specially cultivated strains of the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is used along with sugars […]
Control over the genome and the epigenome has continued to be a prime focal point for the fields of science. New genome editing technologies and their related epigenetic tools has only exacerbated this spotlight. However, there are other areas of expression control that are available and some techniques, such as RNA interference (RNAi), seem to […]
Properly breeding a plant for the traits you want is hard. It requires hundreds of plants and hundreds of cross-breeding attempts between them to obtain desired traits, isolate them, and cross them into more vigorous cultivars with other wanted traits. That was how it was done for most of human history and it’s a long, […]
Gene editing itself has truly just been the start of the modern biotechnological revolution. As time has passed, the nuance of capability with tools like CRISPR has evolved to not only be more precise, but to also have additional options beyond just additions or deletions of genes. New versions have included things like inducing point […]
When it comes to gene editing technologies like CRISPR, the initial applications were focused around just that, the capability to edit and alter gene sequences. The main efforts after were to enhance the specificity of this activity and to improve further what could be changed. But in recent years we’ve begun to see an expansion […]
Going back to the beginning of CRISPR feels like traveling through a time portal. The gene editing technology has become so ingrained in our lives, in scientific literature and the news, that it feels like it’s been a decade or two already since we started using it. It comes as a bit of a shock […]
