Here’s a round-up of some of the stories from my SciCommByTyler instagram account. Follow me on instagram to see similar stories each weekday!
Pig sperm don’t freeze well
Many farmers use artificial insemination to breed their animals. This process involves injecting female animals with sperm from specific males. With artificial insemination, farmers can quickly breed their best male animals with many females. The result is many offspring with useful traits.
It is useful to be able to freeze sperm from high quality males. Such frozen sperm can be transported to other farms or stored for future use. This helps spread useful genetic traits.
Unfortunately, farmers don’t have super effective ways to freeze pig sperm. Many pig sperm die during the freezing process. Farmers still use artificial insemination for pig breeding. It’s just more difficult to store or transport pig sperm for extended use.
Scientists hope to overcome this problem with creative genetic engineering techniques. I’ll be writing more about this soon!
Growing cloned trees
Like all organisms, trees have DNA. Specific kinds of trees have specific DNA sequences that give them particular qualities. Natural forests are composed of many different trees with different DNA sequences. They are beautifully diverse jumbles.
In contrast, tree farmers often grow rows and rows of trees with identical DNA – tree clones. They do so because they want many trees with very specific characteristics. These characteristics make their wood valuable for particular uses. Clonal forests are beautiful in their own way.
Injecting viruses into the eye
DNA sequences encode cellular parts that give cells their functions. In some forms of blindness, altered DNA sequences encode broken parts. These broken parts can lead to progressive vision loss.
As I’ve written about before, viruses can deliver DNA sequences to cells. These scientist-designed DNA sequences can fix cellular parts and treat diseases.
It’s hard to get such viruses to some parts of the body. However, it’s actually quite easy to get them into the eye. Thus scientists can inject viruses with corrective DNA sequences into the eye and restore vision to some patients.