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 health of plants is paramount for farmers, gardeners, and scientists alike. They not only provide the food we need to survive, but their overall well-being is a marker for the strength of the environmental conditions around them. And there are many things, much like with us humans, that can be a cause for alarm. […]
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 […]
When studying the impact or function of particular genes, sometimes just being able to have them be expressed isn’t good enough. An always on state can be just as frustrating and produce just as useless data as an off state would. This is especially true for signaling and transportation genes, where the entire point of […]
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, […]
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 […]
The Green Revolution, that near-mythical time nowadays where the imaginations of technology became real and millions of lives were saved from starvation, was, sad to say, never a full solution to the problem. It was a stop-gap. An incredibly successful one that managed to push back the looming issue for decades, but still only temporary […]
Abstract By Brigette Corder, Sterling Ericsson, and Taylor Uhlir The CRISPR-Cas systems are a new and exciting tool for research and scientific discovery. Here we discuss and compare the various CRISPR-Cas systems and report current uses for these systems by concentrating a principal spotlight on CRISPR-Cas 10. From CRISPR’s rudimentary beginnings in the form of […]
Sudden death syndrome is, as the name would suggest, a devastating disease. It first emerged in Arkansas in 1971 and has since spread across the US and even into South America by the 1990’s, causing heavy fatalities. The fungus that causes it, Fusarium virguliforme, can be considered the root of one of the most deadly […]
Sometimes doctors are able to accomplish the most miraculous of surgeries using top of the line technology. Treatments with an incredibly low chance of success and with a high risk of death. Successes that likely will not be possible to do again in the near future, even with other patients with the same condition. That […]
