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 […]
While the honeybee has a comparatively negligible role when it comes to pollination in the wild, that niche filled by the dozens of other bee species that are also often colony-less, they nonetheless have an important spotlight on them when it comes to human agriculture. This is so even if they only make up less […]
Once upon a time, scientists thought genetics and genomes were fairly straightforward. A gene encodes a protein and that protein carries out the actions that cause physical, metabolic effects and even phenotypic effects visible to others. It was a direct and simple system, a functional way for something formed through natural selection to be built. […]
The cellular processes of aging are complicated and varied. There are both genetic and mechanical components that all have an ultimate effect on a person as they age and reach the period of senescence. But it is not only humans and our medical community that are attempting to arrest this mechanism, the cells themselves also […]
From the start of things, science has always relied on the organisms that can be made to be a representation of more complex systems. They were a model for either humans themselves or to show in their own simplicity how life builds up to larger formations of cells and processes. That has long been the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Drug resistant pathogens are an ongoing plague for the medical field and efforts to find original drugs and other solutions are slow going. The past few years, however, have seen some new scientific discoveries that might finally prove to be a more long-term option to help deal with such disease-causing offenders. These contemporary options though […]
With an ever increasing population and global interaction, trade between nations and people moving to and fro poses distinct risks to biosecurity concerns. Human diseases are obviously top of the list, but because they involve direct contamination by humans themselves with other humans, most medical organizations around the world have numerous measures in place to […]
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 […]
