Not every genetic modification has to involve a violent cleaving of nucleotides to insert or remove sections of the genome. The most common form this type of change takes involves what are termed double-strand breaks (DSBs) and they have long been something that scientists have wanted to avoid if possible. You may remember us discussing […]
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 […]
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 […]
As things change, they ultimately stay the same. Or perhaps a better metaphor is that we always end up circling back to the beginning, retracing our own footsteps. That seems to be the case today, though not in a bad way. The Early Bloom One of the very first original biotech experiments back in the […]
The research into new forms of CRISPR seems never-ending. It is an ongoing goal of scientists around the world to expand scientific knowledge on different kinds of CRISPR and also creating newfound capabilities for the existing varieties. Since the greater the flexibility of the tools available to science, the more treatments and medicines that can […]
While genetic modification tools like CRISPR have opened up new doors to making changes to genomes, it is still not as simple of a task as putting the CRISPR complex into a cell and having it go to work. It first must be given a target DNA sequence to focus on and, in most cases, […]
In a previous article, we discussed how CRISPR is not almighty and that organisms can evolve resistance to the changes made to their genome. The simplest method for them to accomplish this is just to mutate the changed gene back to what it was before or just stop its function altogether. If the change made […]
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 […]
A Historical Viewpoint The Explosion Onto The Public Stage For those focused on how history will favor the uncovering of CRISPR and the miraculous developments that have and will spawn from it, the first thing to note is that the idea and research into the technology started several years prior to its explosion into the […]
