Corn earworm

New Hybrid Swarm Combines Deadly Agricultural Pests Into Mega-Pests

Protecting farmers and their agricultural output around the world is a daunting task. Each region has its own trials and tribulations related to their temperature, rainfall, soil consistency, and of course, their pathogens. An unfortunate side effect of the otherwise hugely beneficial impact of international trade is that the pathogens faced in one corner of […]

Samphire salt marsh - St Kilda South Australia

Plant Salt Tolerance: Recent Research in Biotechnology

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. […]

Creek and old-growth forest-Larch Mountain

The Role of Prions in Plants: An Overview

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, […]

Stem rust close up

A Decades Old Once Thought Eradicated Scourge Returns To Europe

As we have seen so often in recent years when it comes to human pathogens, eradicating a disease from a major population, country, or continent does not mean those results will be permanent forever. Any sort of laxity in preventative treatment and strict efforts against global spread can result in the re-emergence of a deadly […]

CSIRO ScienceImage 11085 A scanning electron micrograph of a female dust mite

Evolutionary Rewiring of Dust Mite Genome Made Unique RNAi Silencing

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 […]

Restoring an urban stream (after) (7557277790)

Bioremediation: The Biology of Cleaning Environmental Pollution

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 […]

Scanning electron micrograph of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and a dead Human neutrophil - NIAID

9 New Bacterial Defense Systems May Herald CRISPR-Like Discovery

Going back to the beginning of CRISPR feels like traveling through a time portal. The gene editing technology has become so ingrained in our lives, in scientific literature and the news, that it feels like it’s been a decade or two already since we started using it. It comes as a bit of a shock […]

Smed

The Secrets of the Regenerating Flatworm’s Genome Are Unveiled

When studying such complex topics as wholesale body replication and regeneration of limbs, it is a heady subject to tackle all at once. And it’s unlikely that beginning on something the size of mammals, using model organisms or not, is going to reveal anything at all without a basic understanding of how regeneration is supposed […]

Cuscuta campestris

Parasitic Plants Manipulate the Genetic Expression of Their Host Plants

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 […]