The ARTS of life and death in the intestinal stem cells

After passing through the stomach, the next stage of the digestive system occurs in the small intestine, where nutrients and minerals are absorbed. With a host of digestive enzymes, in addition to a diverse microbiome present, the lining of the small intestine is exposed to quite the ‘chemical soup’ that causes the cells much wear […]

Are you looking for NSAA and/or A level Biology/Chemistry tuition?

Memorising facts for exams these days is not enough anymore. Exam techniques including, pulling out the key points from a question, structuring your answers and the dreaded “thinking outside of the box”, are instead being tested. This added stress can become unbearable, but there are strategies and steps that can be taken to circumvent this. […]

How do enzymes survive the snow? Adapting adenylate kinase to the cold.

Regardless of the weather, our bodies have evolved to function optimally at 37 ℃. However, we are an insignificant speck of the vast array of species out there, where many, if not most, species are operating at temperatures that could either freeze or frazzle us! Enzymes are the key players in catalysing the many biochemical […]

How to revise biology: remembering abbreviations

With exams on the horizon, you might be starting to panic about that huge list of biological terms that you need to remember. Worst of the lot, the dreaded abbreviations. There are numerous abbreviations in biology; protein names, reagents, chemical compounds and yep, this can turn revision into a logistical nightmare. But it doesn’t have […]

Get transcribed in style: The CTD that everyone’s talking about

Protein Profile #1: RNA polymerase II Much like the variety of outfits we wear to follow the latest fashion trend, cells mediate their own styles through changing their gene expression patterns to fit with their surrounding environment. Gene expression is an important daily event for a cell which results in the production of proteins but […]

Centrosomes, not centromeres, and error-correcting kinetochores

Not only is this title a painful reminder of a mistake I made in my exam this year, but simply wrong since centromeres will still be included in discussion! So, just to clarify, centrosomes are the organelles from which microtubules (MTs)* arise from, whilst centromeres are regions on chromosomes that attach to MTs via the […]

CRISPR just got snappy…

Biologists have a way of coming up with cool abbreviations; ChIP(Chromatin immunoprecipitation), DAPPER (DAtabase for Protein-Protein intERactions), ERGIC (ER–Golgi intermediate compartment) , TESCO (testis specific enhancer of Sox9 core element), but one of my personal favourites is CRISPR* – clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats. *And as Hermione might say, it’s not crispaar, it’s, crisper. […]