When your body is in danger, your cells need to react fast to let everyone else know. If you stick your hand in a fire, your brain and your muscle cells have to be notified as soon as possible in order to force the subconscious pullback from the pain and damage, before you’ve even realized […]
You never know when what at first seemed like an innocuous bit of research will turn into the next big tool to help prevent or mitigate the symptoms of a major disease. Coincidental discoveries like that happen all the time and small parts of nature can turn out to have applications we never would have […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tracking plant pathogens is no simple matter. Due to their possible environmental hidey holes being in the soil, the air, other plants, or the host plants themselves lying dormant, any and every possibility must be accounted for. And the triggers that begin active pathogenicity and harm to the plant is connected to a convoluted system […]
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 […]
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 […]
The health of plants is paramount for farmers, gardeners, and scientists alike. They not only provide the food we need to survive, but their overall well-being is a marker for the strength of the environmental conditions around them. And there are many things, much like with us humans, that can be a cause for alarm. […]
Control over the genome and the epigenome has continued to be a prime focal point for the fields of science. New genome editing technologies and their related epigenetic tools has only exacerbated this spotlight. However, there are other areas of expression control that are available and some techniques, such as RNA interference (RNAi), seem to […]
The diseases out there in the world seem limitless. Every new nook and cranny we uncover shows new lifeforms and new diseases they cause or that are subjected upon them. The Earth is just a melting pot of infection (and parasitism) of every species trying to take advantage of every other. Due to their ubiquity, […]
