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Blog 46: Letting Evolution Do the Work

Hey everyone! Welcome back to this week’s blog. I hope you all have had a great weekend. Anyway, for today’s post, I wanted to shift perspectives a little. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking a lot about how scientists can control cells by turning genes on and off, changing cell identity, and even influencing how cells communicate and behave. But what if I told you that sometimes, instead of designing biology… Scientists just let biology figure it out on its own? This idea is called directed evolution, and it’s one of the most powerful tools in modern synthetic biology. What Is Directed Evolution? Directed evolution is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of carefully designing the perfect biological system, scientists: Create variation Select the best-performing version Repeat the process Over multiple cycles, the system improves. It’s basically natural evolution, but sped up and controlled in a lab. Why Not Just Design It? At first, this might seem backward. If we understand D...
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Blog 45: Quorum Sensing

Hello again! I hope everyone’s Sunday is going well so far. As I was brainstorming what to write this week, I thought back to what I’ve been writing about in the last few blog posts. After writing about biological electricity last week and how cells can use voltage to communicate and control behavior, I wanted to shift gears a little and look at something equally interesting… but in a completely different way. We’ve talked a lot about what individual cells do. But what happens when cells start acting together? Because as it turns out, cells don’t always act alone. In many cases, they actually “wait” for each other before doing anything. This process is called quorum sensing. What Is Quorum Sensing? Quorum sensing is a way for cells, especially bacteria, to communicate with one another and make decisions collectively. Instead of acting immediately, cells release small signaling molecules into their environment.  As more and more cells release these molecules, the concentration incre...
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Blog 44: The Electrical Language of Cells

Hey everyone! I hope you all have had a good Sunday so far. For this week’s blog topic, I wanted to explore something that honestly surprised me when I first learned about it. When we think about how cells work, we usually think in terms of chemistry. Stuff like signals, proteins, and DNA, all of it feels very chemical-based. But cells don’t just communicate using chemicals. They also use electricity.  And once you start looking at biology through that lens, a lot of things start to look very different. Cells Are Electrically Active Every cell in your body maintains a difference in electrical charge across its membrane. This is known as the membrane potential. Basically, the inside of a cell and the outside of a cell have different concentrations of charged particles, like sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. Because of this imbalance, a voltage difference arises. So even at rest, your cells are not neutral. They are electrically active. Not Just Neurons When people hear “electrici...
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Blog 43: Can We Control the Speed of Life? (Biological Time)

Hey everyone! It's my fault for missing the usual Sunday posting time for these blogs. My baseball team had its annual spring break trip, and I completely forgot to get something out. However, now that the trip has ended, I have had some time to prepare for “last week’s” blog. Anyway, for this week, I wanted to take a step in a completely different direction from what I’ve been writing about recently. Over the past few blogs, I’ve focused a lot on what cells are and how they decide what to become. But as I thought about it more, I realized there’s another layer of biology that we don’t talk about enough. It’s not just about what life does… but how fast it does it. Because if you really think about it, life runs on a timeline. Cells divide, organisms grow, tissues heal, and eventually everything ages. But none of these processes happen at the same speed across different systems. So that raises a really interesting question: What actually controls the speed of life? Life Doesn’t Run ...
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Blog 42: How Cells Decide What They Become

Hey everyone! Welcome back to this week’s blog. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been diving into how cells control their identity. I’ve talked about gene regulation, epigenetics, and even how scientists can reprogram cells or convert them into completely different types. But as I was thinking, all of the topics I’ve talked about the last 4 weeks lead to one bigger question: Before we even try to change a cell’s identity . . . how does it get that identity in the first place? How does a single cell know whether to become a neuron, a muscle cell, or part of your skin? That’s what today’s topic is about, and the process is known as cell fate determination. What Is Cell Fate? Cell fate refers to the final identity a cell adopts. Early in development, cells are much more flexible. They have the potential to become many different types of cells. But as development continues, cells gradually become more specialized. At some point, a cell commits. From that point on, it will follow a specific pa...
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Blog 41: Cellular Reprogramming

Hey everyone, and welcome back to the blog! I hope you guys have all had a good weekend and can sit back, relax, and enjoy today’s topic as you wrap up. Last week I talked about transdifferentiation. In case you didn’t read, transdifferentiation is the idea that one mature cell type can sometimes be converted directly into another. That concept alone already challenges the traditional view that cells are permanently locked into their identities. But scientists eventually discovered something even more surprising. Instead of converting one cell type directly into another, it’s sometimes possible to reset a mature cell back into a stem-like state.  This process is called cellular reprogramming. What Is Cellular Reprogramming? Cellular reprogramming is the process of taking a fully developed cell and reverting it to a pluripotent state, meaning it can develop into many different cell type s. These cells are thus known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. The key idea is th...
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