E coli at 10000x

How To Control GMOs: Biocontainment and Genetically Modified Bacteria

When dealing with bacteria in a lab setting, it is often a requirement to ensure that the risk of the bacteria escaping from containment is as minimized as possible. This is especially so if developing bacteria that produce a substance that one wouldn’t want to allow to get into the wild. Escape Risk and Non-Competitiveness […]

Mycena inclinata, Clustered Bonnet, UK

Fungi Parasitism: The Ins And Outs Of Biotechnology and Biocontrol

The modern world has a multitude of issues it is facing, most of which filter through and incorporate agriculture in some fashion. Whether speaking of climate change, overpopulation, deforestation, or any number of other topics, the food supply and how we produce it is involved. For a significant chunk of the countries in the world, […]

Tribolium castaneum87-300

CRISPR Gene Drive Resistance Due To Inbreeding And Mutations

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 […]

Utricularia gibba3

Carnivorous, Flowering Bladderwort Reveals Depths of Gene Duplication

Genetics can get weird. Especially so in plants, which are more conducive to hybridization and duplications of their entire genome. Polyploidy, as such a duplication is called, is often rampant across ancestral lineages of plants and makes species classification taxing, to say the least. The Flowers and the Carnivores The flowering plants, also known as […]

A fly's first breath 1

Why Don’t Damaging Mutations Kill Off Humanity And Complex Life?

How is humanity still alive? How is most complex life still going in the first place? Biologically speaking, the number of genetic mutations we have with every generation that results in a negative effect should have wiped us all out. Simple Processes Natural selection as a random process and the error rate in our own […]