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 […]
Robustness is a characteristic that is highly desired for all plants that we grow, with the term covering the gamut of stress resistances and ability to defend oneself from pathogenic attacks. At the same time, however, agricultural breeders desire to bring in wild relatives of plants to provide a greater diversity of traits and, indeed, […]
Each type of CRISPR has its own unique and special properties that allow it to edit and modify DNA, and in some cases RNA, in a variety of useful manners. This includes Cas10’s ability to target mutated sequences, Cas1 and Cas2’s viral DNA insertion abilities, and Cas12’s high detection abilities for viral DNA hiding in […]
When the potential of CRISPR was first identified, its abilities seemed limitless as if it could be used to accomplish anything. But, in reality, those early days saw a very limited CRISPR that could only be inserted into a few kinds of cells and could only make a few narrow types of change accurately. The […]
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 […]
When it comes to dealing with viruses, often no single countermeasure will do. The scientific community has long since found that, in many cases, any one solution will quickly end up useless once the target virus mutates to get around the blockade, no matter what form it initially takes. That’s why in the medical community […]
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 […]
