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 […]
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 […]
The fight against the many forms of cancer has been a long and ongoing battle, with each different type requiring a novel and targeted solution to defeat. Generalized treatments have arisen over time, with the likes of CAR T-cell therapy, but there are still numerous hurdles depending on the cancer being dealt with. Before that […]
When it comes to using CRISPR on a broad scale, different types of applications have to be utilized for different systems. If modifying bacterial genomes are the focus, then a viral vector to get the CRISPR complex into the cell is efficient enough for most purposes. But on multicellular organisms, there can be a number […]
There has, since 2012, been a problem in the biotechnology science community, much akin to the problems faced by the community involved in vaccine research. It is likely that many of you are already aware of the story of Andrew Wakefield and his shoddy study involving fabricated data and made up children where he concluded […]
Research into sexual embryonic development and the forms of offspring progeneration has long been a source of study to determine yet another facet to early formation of the embryo. Mammals are a bit special when it comes to the topic of genetic development of the egg cell. All of our animal cousins among the reptiles, […]
When researching the effects medicine has on a living organism or when trying to track how a disease is contracted and spreads throughout the body or when just simply wanting to test an observation in nature within a controlled and reliable setting, the scientific community has the greatest thanks to offer to the model organisms. […]
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is how the saying goes. But does that have to be true? A hammer can actually be a quite versatile instrument and, with some insight and ingenuity, be put to tasks that would previously have been thought outside of its purview. A hammer […]
The methods available to treat bacterial infections are many. But among those with any real and lasting effectiveness, their usage is limited. Antibiotics were once the Holy Grail of medicine to deal with devastating diseases that wiped out entire populations. With them, these suffering conditions were almost entirely wiped out and the populace began to […]
