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 […]
With the world continuing on its course toward severe climate instability in the future, the desire to reduce the use of fossil fuels and lower humanity’s production of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide has become an issue of ever greater importance as the years go on. But there are a number of highly beneficial chemicals […]
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 […]
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 […]
COI Notice: One of the authors of this paper is my Principal Investigator (P.I.). I, however, had no involvement in this paper or the experiments done in it. When it comes to understanding plant genetics and the potential for improvements in growth and development, it should be argued that the humble mitochondria deserves the bulk […]
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 […]
While genetic modification technologies have been expanding rapidly in the biological and medical spheres, there is an obvious limitation in how this sort of research is applied. For the microscopic level and the macro beyond it, only a select number of organisms have proven to be amenable to such modification techniques. Others have either shown […]
Since the beginning of genetic engineering and its use in plant biology, the microorganism Agrobacterium tumefaciens has been a prominent figure in scientific endeavors. The natural processes of the species involves them modifying their cellular surroundings inside tree hosts to provide them with the nutrients they need. As a side effect of this process, they […]
When speaking of spiciness in science, we use an entirely different term that perhaps holds a slightly altered connotation in common language: pungency. It is this that refers to the sensation of heat after consumption and how intense and long-lasting that effect is on the average consumer. And there is no other quintessential aspect of […]
The process of fermentation is one that has been with humanity since nearly the beginning in the Neolithic era and has been used in a variety of ways for unique types of foods. The most obvious kinds include bread and alcohol, but there are also plenty of other, more specialized products out there. And there […]
