Molecular Biology but spooky

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD is a condition associated with high stress situations, whether that be military service, abusive relationships or childhood trauma.   The disorder was originally defined as a "disorder that resulted from exposure to a traumatic environmental event" and this was meant to be universal and persistent diagnosis. Up until approximately the 1990's it would have been absurd to claim that genes could be a contributing factor to PTSD but two studies changed the overall relationship between genes and PTSD.  The first study showed that cortisol levels in people with PTSD were actually lower than people without it.  If that seems strange it should, and was for the researchers at the time.  Cortisol is associated with stress and it was theorized that people with PTSD would have high levels of cortisol overall since it was thought to be a condition caused solely by extreme stress or trauma.  The second experiment was actually unre...

Parasites are sneaky organisms that have developed interesting ways of invading their host as well as staying alive once they have infiltrated.  One of these mechanisms is a coating called glycocalyx that is essentially a protective coat that parasites where to trip your bodies bouncer and get into the club.   The parasites that have this outer coating such as, Trypanosoma brucei brucei, have a membrane surrounding them that mimics glycan (sugar) structures that interact with the host cell membranes to infect the host. The main idea behind this post is just that there are many mechanisms by which parasites can integrate into a host and this path of infection is relatively new.  Much like with other posts on my blog and other things in biology ( specifically microbiology and molecular biology) there are people working on ways to target glyosylation production as well as glycan antigen structures.   Rodrigues, Joao A, et al. "Parasite Glycobiology: A Bitte...

The field of molecular biology is versatile and ever evolving, it has to be since life is ever evolving. One of the things I have picked up in just reading a few articles pertaining to molecular biology is that as soon as people understand HOW something occurs in a living system the next question is immediately "how do we use that system to our advantage" and it leads to incredible discoveries in areas that would likely have not been considered prior to the birth of this field.  One such example that I am going to delve into is the wild world of the ricin toxin.  Ricin is one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances known (as of April 2016) but as soon as its' biological processes were understood the next step was turning the harmful parts of it into beneficial ones. Ricin is a highly potent toxin has quite an interesting history going from umbrella guns to cures for cancer.  The toxin is found in the seeds of castor beans which typically grow in tropical re...

The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology a very original topic I know but, I think it is good to start anything at the beginning so this is where I decided to start this blog.  The principle was proposed by Francis Crick in 1958 but, the paper I will be discussing will be his defense of the term in 1970 called;  Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.    As a bit of background, although it has probably been drilled into most biology majors, the Central Dogma shows the flow of  genetic information between DNA, RNA and proteins. An important feature of the principle is that is does not mean linear transfer of information but the three families of polymers could interact in a more triangular configuration.  The concept about the Central Dogma that is most intriguing to modern scientists however is that there were some interactions that were theorized to never occur and some could only occur under " special circumstances".  This term proposed by Crick sets t...