Developmental biology can be a wild field to study. Through looking into the fundamental genes controlling body structure and the formation of the body as a whole, strange and bizarre effects can be discovered from the smallest of changes. One of the most famous being the creation of fruit flies that grow a pair of […]
Drought continues to be a primary driver of famine and crop loss around the world, with the accompanied water shortages not only affecting food production, but also drinking water availability. It is predicted that, by 2025, over two and a half billion people will be facing those sort of water shortages, especially as the effects […]
Specificity and efficiency in targeting is one of the hallmark aims of any CRISPR system. The ability to edit a genome is useless without the capability to target a particular sequence and reliably alter it. Thus, work has been perpetually ongoing in the hunt to find better CRISPR systems or to even design one from […]
Recent events shed a light on what we possibly face in the future, as hurricanes and other weather events become more severe due to the increased energy capacity of the atmosphere from greenhouse gas influx. The colloquial term for this process is climate change. And scientists are hard at work on finding ways to mitigate […]
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 […]
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 […]
Describing what digital biology entails has never been an easy task. At times it has been considered a twin to synthetic biology and at others a subset of biodata fields. Its true nature is so broad that even considering it to be a single field may end up proving fallacious in the future and it […]
The horrors of nematodes may never cease, but they can teach us some surprising things, including a method of plant control that may completely alter our approach in dealing with the nematodes themselves. Infestation and Takeover The first step to explaining this new insight is to break down how the nematodes infect plants in the […]
The key to helping plants grow is to understand the mechanisms behind and inside their growth, to learn why they decided to sprout at one time over another and why flowering at one point happened and not at another time. Due to these processes being intrinsic to the life cycle of the plant, tied up […]
Even more so than coffee, tea is the most popular drink in the world, barring alcohol itself. Its history stretches back thousands of years and across dozens of cultures. The caffeine within and the multiple health benefits from regular consumption have helped continue its popularity to this day. But that popularity includes an ever increasing […]