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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
When it comes to dealing with viruses, often no single countermeasure will do. The scientific community has long since found that, in many cases, any one solution will quickly end up useless once the target virus mutates to get around the blockade, no matter what form it initially takes. That’s why in the medical community […]
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 […]
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 […]
The importance of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is likely understated in science. It was discussed only rarely in the past and, despite its current popularity and resurgence in relevance today, it continues to retain further secrets within the natural world that we have yet to uncover. We now openly know and have showcased over the […]
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 […]
