“Ay-pop-toh-sis”
When I was still an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, I attended a Department of Microbiology & Immunology seminar on the mechanisms of cell death. The speaker insisted that...
Kittybiome – Right Now!
I will be honest: I love cats. I also love immunology. In a perfect world, I would find myself playing with cats all day in the lab. This could actually...
Research Highlights: A Selection from the Scientific Fiction Literature
Science Editorials on Televised Immunology highlights articles in the scientific fiction field that discuss the most recent progress in fertility and reproduction between humans and humanoid organisms, from the regulatory...
Letter from the Chair – Summer 2015
[caption id="attachment_1639" align="alignright" width="376"] Dr. Juan Carlos Zúñiga-Pflücker, Chair, Department of Immunology, University of Toronto[/caption] I am well aware that every issue of IMMpress Magazine is the result of a...
Letter from the Editors – Summer 2015
[caption id="attachment_1634" align="aligncenter" width="622"] Co-Editors Kieran Manion (left) and Catherine Schrankel (right).[/caption] How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.” – Charles Darwin It has often been said that children are our future and this...
Behind Enemy Lines: Using Vector Biology to Reduce Disease Transmission
Nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria infection, a mosquito-borne disease caused by the parasitic protozoan Plasmodium. Without an approved malaria vaccine, infection prevention has focused...
CRISPR in the Red Queen’s Court: The Evolutionary Arms Race with Phage and Other Adventures in Wonderland
The CRISPR/Cas system (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated sequences) is an adaptive immune system found in archaea (extremophiles) and bacteria. Briefly, acquired CRISPR-driven immunity is based on integration of...
Trust Your Gut: The Beginner’s Guide to Microbiome Research
THE WORLD WITHIN US: LIFE AS A SUPRAORGANISM [caption id="attachment_1647" align="alignright" width="297"] BOX 1: Meet Dr. Susan Robertson, a trained microbial ecologist currently working as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr....
The Ethics of Embryo Editing
As the battle for ownership to the intellectual property behind CRISPR/Cas9 carries on, the gene editing technology continues to grow at an accelerated pace. However, surrounding the extraordinary research potential...