Posts tagged: DNA

Breaking Bad: DNA Double Strand Break Repair with DNA Polymerase Theta

DNA encodes all of the information required by your body to live and function. However, that DNA is broken daily and must be repaired so that cells can divide and allow us to grow, heal, process, and develop. There are a number of ways that your DNA can break, but the worst type of break is a double strand break.

Visualization of DNA

On Wednesday, April 25th, the Penn Museum Teen Ambassadors hosted our second Teen Science Café. Our speaker was Raquel Fleskes, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology whose work focuses on using genetics to answer questions about migration and settlement patterns during the colonial period in North America. She visited the Penn Museum to talk to teens about the

Hijacking Nature’s Machinery

Authored by Sirisha Gudavalli, Teen Leader Often times, the solutions to our toughest challenges can be taken from nature. In the past couple of years, scientists discovered the mechanism by which a bacterium protects itself against viral infection using a cellular defense system called CRISPR. CRISPR has many potential applications in science as a tool for genetic manipulation. Boulder’s

DNA Code Breaking

How does DNA store genetic information? Fifty years ago, scientists cracked the genetic code and learned how our genes store information. The genetic code helps us ‘read’ our genes to understand how they work, and how mutations break them in disease. But it turns out that the genetic code only works on a tiny fraction of our DNA, and so

African Forest Elephants

How do you study an animal difficult to see? African Forest Elephants are the largest land animals, yet surprisingly there is a hidden species that we know very little about. This species, the African Forest Elephant has been understudied because it can easily hide in dense forests. Scientists, therefore, have to be creative and use a combination of methods to