Biofilms are an ingenious evolutionary creation, but one that gives us humans a lot of trouble in fighting bacteria. Film Development Originally, there was no real need for bacteria to clump together in most situations, due to their free-floating water environment. But land surfaces (and debris in the waters) enabled them to form extracellular matrixes […]
Synthetic biology is complicated. When you’re building biological systems from the ground up, how could it not be? But the results are almost always something amazing, a real revolutionary accomplishment that wouldn’t be possible with any other field of science. The only other field that comes close is nanotechnology and mechanical systems are still somewhat […]
Evolution isn’t perfect. It is not a controlled or directed system, but instead just a result of adaptation to one’s environment through trial and error. Over a long period of time and generations, this trends toward organisms with better traits suited for their environment, because those with less suited traits from random mutations when born […]
We’ve discussed the creation of electronic plants recently and the idea of using plants as electrical storage and transferring devices, allowing an electric connection from, say, one end of a garden or field to another. But plants can transfer far more than just electricity. They are already masters at transferring necessary nutrients from the soil […]
It is a simple fact of science that over evolutionary time, such as thousands or even millions of years, an organism’s diet can influence and alter its genetics to make it more adapted toward the food it eats. The Effects of Agriculture There is a natural assumption that the same is true for humans, as […]
Progress continues on the Synthetic Yeast Project, an international scientific initiative that aims to build a yeast genome out of completely synthetic chromosomes. The latest update involves seven papers published together in the journal Science detailing the five pre-designed chromosomes that have been successfully swapped into the genome of yeast. The model organism S. cerevisiae […]
It’s best just to start off with the most basic, blatant information about gluten and claims of reactions to it, before we get into today’s study. Debunking Some Pseudoscience Unless you have celiac disease, you cannot have a reaction to gluten. So-called “gluten intolerance” was debunked by the very team of scientists that claimed its […]
We’ve discussed symbiotic relationships before, from the endosymbiosis that bacteria have with plants and fungi to the mutualistic relationships between plants and fungi directly. But those occasional dalliances are nowhere on the scale of what happens with orchids in the family Orchidaceae. The Deadly Life of Orchids Practically all orchids currently known, 28,000 and counting, […]
Communities of bacteria in the soil and in aquatic environments work together to assist each other. For scientists, it is often difficult to study these organisms because their cultivation relies on the inclusion of the other species being in their environment as well. Attempts to culture individual species on, say, a petri dish usually fails. […]
Across the entire phylum of arthropods, there is something that unites almost all of them. Beyond their genetics and their physiology that places them within Arthropoda in the first place, there is yet another facet of their biology that is shared. And often not in a positive way. Your Actions Are Not Yours Wolbachia is […]
