Some of the trickier medical problems to deal with are those that are developmental in nature, as these disorders can arise through complicated menageries of genes and regulatory systems to create the negative outcome. And even if the culprit is just a single mutation on a specific gene, it often remains difficult to isolate, identify, […]
Beyond direct improvements to plants, insects, and animals, including humans, that genetic modification technologies have brought to the world, these techniques have also served as crucial tools for modeling other conditions and creating a better understanding of how to not only improve the overall health of living organisms, but also how to combat a myriad […]
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 […]
Plants never cease to reveal their unique and astonishing methods of protecting themselves from pathogens. Here on Bioscription we’ve previously discussed the topic of the pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP) system and how it allows plants to uptake and conserve important foreign molecules for future immune system response. It is, in many ways, similar to the […]
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 […]
