BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Tag: Global Health

The Revolutionary Way Of Detecting Diseases

How it works

Has our way of detecting diseases changed to become more efficient? Well, let’s find out. Scientists at Wenzhou Medical University in China developed a new technique for detecting illness, which uses human tears to identify eye diseases and even early signs of diabetes. The researchers discovered that different types of dry-eye disease produce unique molecular fingerprints in tears and that tears could potentially be used to monitor the progression of diabetes in patients. The technique involves:

  • Collecting tears and adding them to a device with two nano porous membranes.
  • Vibrating the membranes.
  • Sucking the solution through allows small molecules to escape and leaves exosomes behind for analysis.Tears

How it connects to AP bio

The technique for detecting disease using human tears connects to AP Biology in several ways. First, exosomes, small vesicles found in tears, play an essential role in immune system function. Exosomes are involved in the communication between immune cells and can facilitate the transfer of immune-related molecules between cells. Additionally, the mechanism by which exosomes are collected from tears using nano porous membranes is similar to how viruses can latch onto and enter host cells. In this way, the research on exosomes in tears highlights the complex interactions between the immune system and viruses, which is an essential topic in the study of immunity, as we learned in AP Biology.

Stromal lipofuscinosis of the seminal vesicle -- extremely low mag

What can this do for our future?

Ultimately, this efficient method of disease testing using tears has the potential to speed up the diagnostic process and improve patient outcomes significantly. Doctors can make faster and more accurate diagnoses by providing a quick and non-invasive way to gather important information about a patient’s health, potentially leading to earlier treatment and better patient outcomes. Additionally, the ability to test for diseases at home using just a few drops of tears could help to identify and address health issues before they become more serious, potentially saving lives in the long run. But the most important reason is that you will feel no pain because you won’t have to get your blood taken!!!!!!!!

 

A New and Horrifying Effect of COVID-19

The COVID-19 virus has been terrorizing innocent people from all corners of the world. The symptoms and effects of the virus have proven to be devastating especially for young children and the elderly. If that wasn’t bad enough, scientists have recently discovered that COVID-19 is linked to erectile dysfunction.

Read More

Let’s Talk About Malaria

Let’s Talk About Malaria

A small mosquito landing on a human finger.

 

Did you know, that the World Health Organization estimates that roughly 438,000 people die annually due to Malaria? Well, now you do know that unfortunate fact. But – did you know that the total number of people affected by malaria is only growing? In reality, those don’t matter, what does matter is what we are going to do now to combat the issue and CRISPR/cas9 might be the answer. In order to better understand the issue of Malaria and the resolution of utilizing CRISPR/cas9, let’s take an indepth look at both with the assistance of the article about Gene Editing to end Malaria from Vox.

 

So, what is Malaria? According to the Center for Disease Control, Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite. The four kinds of malaria parasites that infect humans are Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae. Typical symptoms causes people to experience fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Left untreated, they may develop severe complications and die. Basically, Malaria has been affecting the global population for decades.  Now, you might be asking yourself: then, what is CRISPR/cas9? Fantastic Question! According to the National Institute of Health, CRISPR/cas9 is recent biomedical technology phenomenon that is drastically changing the genome editing space. In specifically, CRISPR/cas9, which is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9, has generated a lot of excitement in the scientific community because it is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and more efficient than other existing genome editing methods.

 

So, here is the big question: why does it matter? Here is why it matters. When looking at Anopheles Gambiae Mosquito larvae, a common carrier of the Malaria parasite, in a lab in the United Kingdom, a couple of researchers noticed that all of the larvae had a physical red fluorescent phenotype. Although this doesn’t sound shocking, this is extremely shocking as only one parent had the red fluorescent recessive genotype and the other had the dominant wild type, so the expected offspring would be fifty percent with the red fluorescent gene and fifty percent without the red fluorescent gene, but all of the Mosquitos had the red fluorescent gene. This gene has been linked on Mosquitos to the fertility of female mosquitos. Now, you might be asking yourself: when does CRISPR/cas9 come into play? Well, CRISPR/cas9 can target and locate a specific gene, cut, enter itself in and then passed onto the abundant and constant offspring. As a result, when the CRISPR/cas9 is utilized to alter the mosquito population to be resilient to the Malaria parasite and could “wipe” Malaria from the future history of the planet.

 

In reality, I could never say that this is bad thing as it is working to save lives of hundreds of thousands of people globally. As a matter of fact, I would believe the majority of the population would say this is a good thing, but I am going to say this: do it, but do it right. This is something that needs to be done, Malaria has wreaked havoc on our global community for decades and we must move past that, but any small mistake would halt progress in this field for year. In conclusion, let’s keep having a serious discussion on changing the status of Malaria globally.

 

Thank you!

 

From your favorite bacteria,

SAMonella

 

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