Disease research has a lot of safeguards built in, requirements that must be reached before proper human treatment can be started. While it is true that sometimes these conditions are far more onerous than is fair or essential, they do in a general sense help pave the road for effective human medicine. That is why […]
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 […]
As genetic technologies continue to advance, scientists around the world maintain their pursuit of higher research endeavors and what they are individually focused on. Tied to this is the need for ever more sequencing and production of genes, of loci, of entire genomes. We have better sequencing machinery now, after all, they may as well […]
Learning about plant immune systems is one of the first steps toward finding ways to improve their defenses against pathogen attack. The difficulty is that, much like the immune system found in animals, the processes involved are highly complex and also completely different from other kingdoms of life. Finding out about the human immune system […]
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 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 […]
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, […]
As we have seen so often in recent years when it comes to human pathogens, eradicating a disease from a major population, country, or continent does not mean those results will be permanent forever. Any sort of laxity in preventative treatment and strict efforts against global spread can result in the re-emergence of a deadly […]
When studying such complex topics as wholesale body replication and regeneration of limbs, it is a heady subject to tackle all at once. And it’s unlikely that beginning on something the size of mammals, using model organisms or not, is going to reveal anything at all without a basic understanding of how regeneration is supposed […]
The arms race in the plant world is a brutal competition for dominance where failure means death. As scientific understanding of genetics has broadened over the decades, we’ve also come to realize that the organisms in nature have been utilizing even the most complicated of these mechanisms for their advantage in order to survive. Any […]
