The medical field can often perform miracles, using medicines and surgeries to bring people back from the brink of death. Diseases can be cured, but there are limits to what can be fixed. If someone loses a limb, then while the wound left behind may heal, the limb itself won’t magically return. The ability to […]
Basic research has always had the tendency to contain surprising revelations on how the world functions. Whether in physics, chemistry, or biology. And in the case of biological studies, it is one of the reasons why model organisms are so important, as a reflection of all other organisms similar to them and as a way […]
When the potential of CRISPR was first identified, its abilities seemed limitless as if it could be used to accomplish anything. But, in reality, those early days saw a very limited CRISPR that could only be inserted into a few kinds of cells and could only make a few narrow types of change accurately. The […]
The connectivity between plants and their environment is vast and it is those relationships that are essential for the proper growth and development of many leafy organisms. This is particularly so for large forests of trees that have special interactions with the soil microbiome in order to grow their roots and take up the copious […]
Often, while we may get useful compounds from the plants we grow, they can be difficult or costly to extract without specialized technologies. If one wants to only have a pure supply of a particular molecule, it has to be isolated from everything else that makes up the plant itself. And sometimes there are two […]
Plants and their interactions with their environment are always in the middle of a physiological quandary. When it comes to their roots, they need to be permeable so they can absorb water and other nutrients from the surrounding soil, but also impermeable to anything that could be harmful to take up, such as toxic heavy […]
The genetic modification methods involving CRISPR have been a part of science and popular culture for over a decade and we have begun to see scientific accomplishments using Cas9 and all the other CRISPR tools. But it has also been a question of when we’d start seeing items such as food modified by CRISPR become […]
Luminescence is a useful trait to have, both for our use of lights and also in the study of animals and plants. And this is nothing new in science. The application of green fluorescent protein (GFP) has become extremely commonplace in biological research, as it allows for controlled expression and confirmation of other genetic changes […]
When it comes to dealing with viruses, often no single countermeasure will do. The scientific community has long since found that, in many cases, any one solution will quickly end up useless once the target virus mutates to get around the blockade, no matter what form it initially takes. That’s why in the medical community […]
Whether through natural selection or human artificial selection from breeding, developing resistances to pests and other plant-damaging organisms isn’t always a straightforward path. There won’t always be a simple single gene and trait that can be manifested that will fix all the problems. For many traits, there is a required tradeoff where the organisms may […]
