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 […]
Nitrogen fixation is a crucial part of plant growth and agriculture. Because the element nitrogen is a critical ingredient for proper development of plants, they need a steady supply of it in order to grow healthy and have a high yield of offspring seeds. For most plants, this is done by relying on nitrogen already […]
When studying the impact or function of particular genes, sometimes just being able to have them be expressed isn’t good enough. An always on state can be just as frustrating and produce just as useless data as an off state would. This is especially true for signaling and transportation genes, where the entire point of […]
The benefits of modern gene editing techniques and tools come with some downsides. While the precision of new and improved CRISPR systems is continually on the rise, there are some fundamental aspects of the tools that scientists have long wished we could work around, in order to reduce even the most minimal risk of off-target […]
Describing what digital biology entails has never been an easy task. At times it has been considered a twin to synthetic biology and at others a subset of biodata fields. Its true nature is so broad that even considering it to be a single field may end up proving fallacious in the future and it […]
When researching and developing vaccines and treatments for disease outbreaks, one of the most difficult aspects is often lacking active samples of the virus for testing. If an outbreak of a new strain of Ebola occurs somewhere in the world, it can be very difficult to safely get a sample of the virus back to […]
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 […]
Synthetic biology is complicated. When you’re building biological systems from the ground up, how could it not be? But the results are almost always something amazing, a real revolutionary accomplishment that wouldn’t be possible with any other field of science. The only other field that comes close is nanotechnology and mechanical systems are still somewhat […]
