Biology as a written language
Biofilms are an ingenious evolutionary creation, but one that gives us humans a lot of trouble in fighting bacteria. Film Development Originally, there was no real need for bacteria to clump together in most situations, due to their free-floating water environment. But land surfaces (and debris in the waters) enabled them to form extracellular matrixes […]
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 […]
Parasitic worms aren’t only a threat to animal or insects, plants have to deal with them as well. The Worms Attack While these sorts of worms may not outright kill their target plants, they can significantly damage them by causing root and nutrient pathways, like the xylem and phloem, to become deformed from the worms […]
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 […]
Water is important for life. It is a primary source of structure and function in all life forms, even including viruses that use it as interstitial fluid for containing their viral genome. For organisms that produce their own complex compounds, commonly known as autotrophs, water remains the main source of outside material they need to […]
Stem cells were often thought of as the holy grail of biological discovery after they were uncovered by Ernest McCulloch and James Till in 1963. A method to produce cells that can form into any part of the body, potentially providing new organs and prevent horrible disorders like leukemia. Of course, things didn’t really turn […]
The central dogma of molecular biology and genetics is pretty straightforward. You take DNA, then you transcribe the desired gene into RNA (usually mRNA) and, once outside of the nucleus, you translate that RNA using ribosomes into amino acids that then form proteins. Those proteins then do the actual function that their original genetic encoding […]
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 […]
Obtaining medical substances isn’t always an easy task. In the early days of history, the only available sources were from plants and fungi, whereby substances were derived from them in various manners. This wasn’t a very controlled or even effective method, resulting in variable dosages and just not a lot of worthwhile ingredients obtained overall. […]
Evolution isn’t perfect. It is not a controlled or directed system, but instead just a result of adaptation to one’s environment through trial and error. Over a long period of time and generations, this trends toward organisms with better traits suited for their environment, because those with less suited traits from random mutations when born […]