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 […]
Viruses have a variety of tactics they employ in their attacks on bacteria, plants, and animals like us. Their ultimate goal is to hijack the systems of the cell and convert them into producing more of themselves. Some viruses simply reconfigure construction molecules to directly make viral parts, others insert their own viral genes into […]
Revelations on new types of CRISPR classes and proteins continue to be found with every new month of research. This isn’t a surprising fact, as CRISPR is a system that has been, possibly independently, developed among a vast swath of single celled life. There are different versions of such systems all over the place and […]
Temperature is something we worry about in our lives all the time. What temperature is it outside so you know what to wear and what are the conditions going to be in coming days or weeks. Farmers have to worry about this as well, as excessive periods of heat or cold snaps can prove damaging […]
Parasitic worms seem to be a topic being covered here more often as of late, but that’s likely because they are just as involved in every aspect of our lives as bacteria are. Understanding how these worms function can bring new insights into human health, agriculture, and more. In one of our prior articles, we […]
The human immune system is usually a tireless worker that does its best to keep us protected from pathogen invasion. But even for all of its complexity, there are certain parts of it that fail hard when confronted. Enemy Identification When it comes to combating bacteria wishing to harm us, one of the first actions […]
Imaging cellular processes has always been difficult. With biotechnology, we have been able to use marker genes like green fluorescent protein (GFP) to follow the activities of individual cells, but that is a far cry from interior mechanisms within a cell. Since the dawn of the field, technology has advanced so that fluorescent microscopy has […]
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 […]
Plants aren’t all that different than animals, when it comes down to it. While they can photosynthesize their needs from the sun, for the most part, they still require the same general nutrients and access to water that we do. And one other critical component that they need to survive is the ability to breathe. […]
The fight against Potyviruses is seemingly neverending in agriculture. Say Hello To Another Terrible Potyvirus As past discussions have shown, they are some of the most deadly plant viruses out there, causing huge swaths of crop death and harvest losses. Additionally, moving up a level to the family of Potyviridae shows that 30% of all […]
