Parasites are a common theme of biological research due to the impact they have on people’s lives and their ubiquity in organisms around the world. It is practically impossible to find an organism that doesn’t have some sort of parasitic pathogen on or inside them. Even many of the parasites themselves have parasites inside of […]
Contamination of the environment is a topic oft spoken of in an incredibly broad sense. That the actions of some governments or organizations are damaging to their surroundings comes as no surprise, but discussions on the specifics and what can be done to fix the issues rarely comes up in the public societal consciousness. The […]
The ability to make stem cells from other cell types has largely been a recent phenomenon. It took a huge amount of research and testing to get to that point and, even today, it requires a complex cocktail of chemicals to induce the needed genetic and epigenetic changes that revert a cell to its infancy. […]
Human activities often have a number of consequences. In addition to the pollution that our industries and general course of living and expanding bring about, even more minor activities can cause significant environmental contamination. The mere act of digging a deep hole can expose materials and metals that are then able to get into the […]
Our nervous system directs most of our body’s mechanisms without us being away of it. Motor neurons are involved in moving parts of our body, sensory neurons give us each of our major secondary senses like our sense of pain or temperature, and interneurons connect all the other neurons together into a combined whole that […]
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 […]
With the great strides and advances in medicine that have been brought to the stage in the past several decades and especially in the past ten years, there has been a shift in focus and perspective in the pharmacological community. Previously, the task had been to develop medicines to treat conditions big and small or, […]
Evolutionary history can often provide profound insights into genetic switchups in our past that may continue to hold a significant impact on our lives today. Thus, breaking down the genomes of our shared ancestors with other species and points of divergence is a primary area of research in biology. The Sialic Sugar Family The disparities […]
Abstract By Brigette Corder, Sterling Ericsson, and Taylor Uhlir The CRISPR-Cas systems are a new and exciting tool for research and scientific discovery. Here we discuss and compare the various CRISPR-Cas systems and report current uses for these systems by concentrating a principal spotlight on CRISPR-Cas 10. From CRISPR’s rudimentary beginnings in the form of […]
Not every genetic modification has to involve a violent cleaving of nucleotides to insert or remove sections of the genome. The most common form this type of change takes involves what are termed double-strand breaks (DSBs) and they have long been something that scientists have wanted to avoid if possible. You may remember us discussing […]
