Genetics

Adapted from image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The World is Full of Bacteria There are over a billion microbes in just one liter of ocean water [1]. The same goes for a liter of soil. As the human population reaches 7 billion individuals…

Over 250 million years ago, cataclysmic volcanic activity wiped out nearly all life on earth. 65 million years ago, a meteor impact in the Yucatán drove the dinosaurs to extinction. In the past 540 million years of earth’s history, paleontologists have…

-- Every organism is an incredibly complex machine whose biological processes benefit from 3.6 billion years of refinement through natural selection. Thus, it should not be surprising that designing biological systems is still difficult for scientists…

-- Despite major advances in healthcare and disease prevention in the last hundred years, some of the most painful and serious non-infectious human diseases have eluded a cure. These are the so-called genetic diseases, in which a problem in a person’s…

-- Hidden deep in the rural villages of sub-Saharan Africa, a neglected tropical disease called African sleeping sickness kills tens of thousands of people every year. Sleeping sickness is caused by a single-celled parasite named Trypanosoma brucei,…

-- Synthetic biologists are a new breed of researchers: part-scientist, part-engineer. Building on the work of more traditional biologists, synthetic biologists try to use what we know about biology to engineer new functions into living things, such as…

--Mosquitoes, and the diseases they carry, have been a threat to human health for millennia. Despite advances in research and efforts in disease control, mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever still ravage much of the developing world,…

--Almost all of us have, or know someone who has an allergy. An allergy is an overreaction of your immune system to something that is foreign to your body, but may not be dangerous to other healthy individuals. People can be allergic to pollen, mold,…

--The Human Genome turns ten years old this summer. Ten years ago President Clinton and British Prime Minister Blair announced that a draft copy of all 3 billion letters of the genetic code had been finished. The combined public and private effort cost…