Biology

By Connor Gleason Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world. Diseases carried by mosquitoes kill more than 700,000 people annually, and one of the deadliest diseases carried by mosquitoes is malaria. Malaria is caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum; in 2021, there were around 247,000,000 cases of the disease globally. Furthermore, over 619,000 people died from the disease in that same year. Malaria is most prominent in tropical and subtropical climates, and approximately half of the world’s population is at risk of the disease. Recent discoveries have revealed that CRISPR technology, a genome-editing tool, may be able to significantly reduce the rate of malaria transmission in two principal ways—by minimizing mosquito populations and by altering the way the disease’s para...

By Sophia Tabibian In 1977, English biochemist, Fredrick Sanger, created the first full genome sequencing technique, mapping the complete arrangement of genes in a given genome. His method involved electrophoresis and chain-termination. DNA is made up of smaller units called nucleotides. Sanger used modified nucleotides called dideoxynucleotides (ddNTP), which bond to only a single end of nucleotides, breaking long strands of DNA into smaller pieces. He would run four separate reactions, each containing one of the a different types of ddNTP that would bond, and, in turn, cut the DNA at a specific spot. Then, he separated the products of these reactions by size on a special type of gel called polyacrylamide gel, which divides the reactions into four lanes. When the products are placed on...