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 […]
The topic has been raised time and again over the years, especially with the advent of medical biotechnology and the capability to reconstruct genomes wholecloth. Even if science has the capability to make something, should it? Smallpox In The Room In this case and in several prior instances, the discussion has been about the reconstruction […]
Plant growth is such that plants always strive to maximize the amount of sunlight, their energy source, that is hitting their leaves at all times. Due to the often dense growing of many types of plants, it is a constant battle between them to either grow higher to overshadow the rest or seek other methods […]
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 […]
A long-term goal of medicine in the big picture has been developing the field of regenerative medicine in order to work toward growing replacement organs for patients. This process has been decades in the making and, even today, can be finicky at best. Regrowing Everything Though researchers and doctors have begun succeeding more and more […]
In a previous article, we discussed how CRISPR is not almighty and that organisms can evolve resistance to the changes made to their genome. The simplest method for them to accomplish this is just to mutate the changed gene back to what it was before or just stop its function altogether. If the change made […]
Genetics can get weird. Especially so in plants, which are more conducive to hybridization and duplications of their entire genome. Polyploidy, as such a duplication is called, is often rampant across ancestral lineages of plants and makes species classification taxing, to say the least. The Flowers and the Carnivores The flowering plants, also known as […]
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 […]
