Gene editing has progressed in leaps and bounds in the past few years, particularly through the expansive use of CRISPR and the dozens of variant tools made from it that have spawned. But, at the same time, many of those tools focus on fixing individual problems or limitations in the original CRISPR systems and they […]
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 […]
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 […]
Plants never cease to reveal their unique and astonishing methods of protecting themselves from pathogens. Here on Bioscription we’ve previously discussed the topic of the pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP) system and how it allows plants to uptake and conserve important foreign molecules for future immune system response. It is, in many ways, similar to the […]
As genetic sequencing technologies have become cheaper and more plentiful, scientists researching the history of life on Earth have found it that much easier to learn about the answers to the many mysteries that still lay unresolved. A major piece of the puzzle involves the emergence of plant life onto land and out of the […]
Interactions between hosts and their pathogens are numerous and come in so many forms that we continue to categorize them to this day. A unique example often seen in insects is the capability known as polyphenism, where two or more different phenotypes, or physical traits, can emerge from the same genome. This is commonly seen […]
Personalized medicine has become radically different over the past decade. The speed and lowered cost of genome sequencing has made disease screening far more commonplace and as specific cell-based treatments have improved, some conditions that were once thought incurable are becoming very much not so. For immune system focuses, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)—T cells have […]
Tracking plant pathogens is no simple matter. Due to their possible environmental hidey holes being in the soil, the air, other plants, or the host plants themselves lying dormant, any and every possibility must be accounted for. And the triggers that begin active pathogenicity and harm to the plant is connected to a convoluted system […]
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 […]
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 […]
