Gene editing has progressed in leaps and bounds in the past few years, particularly through the expansive use of CRISPR and the dozens of variant tools made from it that have spawned. But, at the same time, many of those tools focus on fixing individual problems or limitations in the original CRISPR systems and they […]
Often, while we may get useful compounds from the plants we grow, they can be difficult or costly to extract without specialized technologies. If one wants to only have a pure supply of a particular molecule, it has to be isolated from everything else that makes up the plant itself. And sometimes there are two […]
Plants and their interactions with their environment are always in the middle of a physiological quandary. When it comes to their roots, they need to be permeable so they can absorb water and other nutrients from the surrounding soil, but also impermeable to anything that could be harmful to take up, such as toxic heavy […]
The genetic modification methods involving CRISPR have been a part of science and popular culture for over a decade and we have begun to see scientific accomplishments using Cas9 and all the other CRISPR tools. But it has also been a question of when we’d start seeing items such as food modified by CRISPR become […]
Whether through natural selection or human artificial selection from breeding, developing resistances to pests and other plant-damaging organisms isn’t always a straightforward path. There won’t always be a simple single gene and trait that can be manifested that will fix all the problems. For many traits, there is a required tradeoff where the organisms may […]
Scientists and scientific publications often discuss CRISPR as a tool that, once inserted successfully into a cell, just gets to work on modifying the host cell genome. Its efficiency and accuracy may vary, but it is often thought of in conversation as a highly effective gene modifying device. That as it turns out is only […]
While the effects of a singular gene and its protein output can be measured and quantified, many traits of organisms are part of far more complex regulatory pathways involving dozens of genes that turn on and off different systems. Mapping out how these pathways interact and what genes make them up has been a key […]
If one is trying to find new and unique traits and abilities in any organism, then the regular span of generations takes far too long in the natural world. Instead of relying on evolution by natural selection, directed evolution by human hands works much better and can be accelerated in multiple ways. So far, the […]
When it comes to using CRISPR on a broad scale, different types of applications have to be utilized for different systems. If modifying bacterial genomes are the focus, then a viral vector to get the CRISPR complex into the cell is efficient enough for most purposes. But on multicellular organisms, there can be a number […]
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is how the saying goes. But does that have to be true? A hammer can actually be a quite versatile instrument and, with some insight and ingenuity, be put to tasks that would previously have been thought outside of its purview. A hammer […]
