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 […]
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 […]
Dealing with all the various forms of cancer is an ongoing medical trial of trying to push a boulder up a very steep hill. While progress is often very clearly and obviously being made, it is still a struggle to make advancements and no one single treatment is often good enough to solve the problem […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
