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 […]
There is an ongoing food crisis that is becoming more severe every year, even if many don’t openly see it in more developed parts of the world. Global actions have improved overall food security for many impoverished and subsistence farming regions, but the larger looming crisis has not been diminished. With limited agricultural space on […]
The creation of transgenic plants and the use of gene modification technologies has been a marvel for agriculture and medicine, with the former seeing the ability to massively increase resistances to stress and higher production and yield possibilities. But, at the same time, even this sort of technology is slow and requires multiple generations of […]
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 […]
Being able to edit the genome of living people has been a long sought after goal of medical research in order to cure any number of genetic disorders. Most such editing research is only able to affect such changes either on a generational level by changing eggs in vivo or in a localized area of […]
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 […]
Basic research has always had the tendency to contain surprising revelations on how the world functions. Whether in physics, chemistry, or biology. And in the case of biological studies, it is one of the reasons why model organisms are so important, as a reflection of all other organisms similar to them and as a way […]
Luminescence is a useful trait to have, both for our use of lights and also in the study of animals and plants. And this is nothing new in science. The application of green fluorescent protein (GFP) has become extremely commonplace in biological research, as it allows for controlled expression and confirmation of other genetic changes […]
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 […]
There are, always, too many pathogens in the world. Often too many to catalog and keep track of and they are constantly changing, whether bacterial, viral, fungal, or even other options. When it comes to plants and agricultural output, the worst kinds of pathogens are those that can infect a variety of important crops grown […]
