The study of evolutionary history and how species have developed into the modern forms we know them for today has always been a continuing and ongoing process. As new knowledge on ancient and extinct species is unearthed and matched to their evolved living descendants, we are then able to further fill out the complicated pattern […]
Viruses are not always loose, free-floating pieces of encapsulated DNA in the environment, unlike most kinds of bacteria. Instead, many of them spend their life cycle, as much as a virus can be said to have one, inside other organisms like the aforementioned bacteria or higher order creatures. And for the viruses in the family […]
While genetic modification tools like CRISPR have opened up new doors to making changes to genomes, it is still not as simple of a task as putting the CRISPR complex into a cell and having it go to work. It first must be given a target DNA sequence to focus on and, in most cases, […]
Analyzing biological phenomena is often difficult to accomplish, even with modern technology. In many cases, for the actions of small biomolecules and other hard to see functioning parts of a cell, we can only take snapshots that tell us a moment in time. But that’s not all that helpful for understanding the actions of enzymes […]
It has long been thought that fossils were a dead medium. There was no real way to obtain any sort of genetic material from them due to the vast time periods involved and so taxonomists and other researchers just had to do their best at fitting ancient creatures into the tree of life however they […]
The diversity of life on Earth is staggering to attempt to comprehend in its entirety. And the species that we are already aware of likely are but a fraction of the true multitude still to discover. This is especially so for the most numerous group in the kingdoms of life: bacteria. A Lack of Gene […]
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 […]
