Occasionally, a scientific discovery can have such an effect that its immediate impact appears to be not all that worthwhile. But those with the ability to see what it might lead to can observe just what massive changes will result from it These kinds of findings end up rewriting fundamental sections of school textbooks and […]
Nitrogen fixation is a crucial part of plant growth and agriculture. Because the element nitrogen is a critical ingredient for proper development of plants, they need a steady supply of it in order to grow healthy and have a high yield of offspring seeds. For most plants, this is done by relying on nitrogen already […]
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 […]
Going back to the beginning of CRISPR feels like traveling through a time portal. The gene editing technology has become so ingrained in our lives, in scientific literature and the news, that it feels like it’s been a decade or two already since we started using it. It comes as a bit of a shock […]
Humans are not the only group of organisms we as a species have to be concerned about. In addition to the impact our direct actions have on the environment around us, there is also the natural interplay between pathogens and wild species that may be exacerbated by the global nature of human travel. That is […]
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 […]
The topic has been raised time and again over the years, especially with the advent of medical biotechnology and the capability to reconstruct genomes wholecloth. Even if science has the capability to make something, should it? Smallpox In The Room In this case and in several prior instances, the discussion has been about the reconstruction […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Historical Viewpoint The Explosion Onto The Public Stage For those focused on how history will favor the uncovering of CRISPR and the miraculous developments that have and will spawn from it, the first thing to note is that the idea and research into the technology started several years prior to its explosion into the […]
