Rosalind Franklin day

Tissue Engineering, Organoids and Genetic Diseases

by Aanya Tashfeen Organoid technology can arguably be considered a significant breakthrough in tissue engineering and stem cell research. An organoid is a three-dimensional culture of organ progenitor cells or stem cells (induced pluripotent, embryonic or adult stem cells) that can grow and self-organise in vitro, forming a near-realistic ‘organ in a dish’ [1]. The …

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Stefan Taubert – Day in the Life Of a Geneticist

by Ideja Bajra Dr. Stefan Taubert is an Associate Professor, scientist (Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics), and Investigator (BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute). He obtained his PhD from the University of Fribourg ans has been a PI since 2009. 1) Thank you for agreeing to this interview Dr. Taubert. Could you explain a bit …

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RNAi Mechanism and Applications

by Lucy Chen Introduction Humans are highly complex, multicellular organisms with millions of cells specialised for particular functions via distinct morphologies and chemistry. The process by which various cell types are generated from one universal type during development is known as cellular differentiation, and is driven by changes in gene expression in response to environmental …

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Martha Chase: The Underappreciated Geneticist

by Omodolapo Bolinda Martha Chase was an American geneticist. In 1952, during the “Hershey-Chase Experiments,” she accompanied Alfred Hershey, helping to experimentally confirm that DNA, not protein, is the genetic material of life [1]. This discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, yet excluded Chase [2]. There is not much …

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Influenza

by Simone Khandpekar Each year, there is a vaccine that is distributed for influenza, more commonly known as the flu. Influenza is a zoonosis, which means that it’s a virus that can be transmitted from animal to humans[1]. Influenza is a virus that belongs to the Orthomyxoviridae family. It is an RNA virus, with 7 …

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How the Genome Proves That SARS-Cov-2 Arose Naturally

by Abigail Brooke The claims that the novel coronavirus causing the current pandemic was engineered in a lab and perhaps even deliberately released have been all over the internet. However, a new study using genomic analyses debunks these claims, providing scientific evidence that the novel coronavirus arose naturally, with the researchers stating that ‘our analyses …

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CRISPR CAS-9: How a biological enigma lead to today’s most widely used gene editing technology

It started out as an oddity. A sequence of viral DNA in the genome of a bacteria, as out of place as a bull in a china shop. A curious observation led to the latest method for editing genes: CRISPR. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) are sequences of viral DNA found in bacterial …

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