misciwriterseditors blog

Behind the Peel: The Chemical Complexities of Apples

Written by: Emily L. Eberhardt

Edited by: Olivia Pifer Alge, Jessica Li, Jeremy Chen, and Ryan Schildcrout

Illustrated by: Paola Medina-Cabrera

“Vaccines are full of chemicals! Wait… so are apples?” While scrolling through social media the other day, I came across an old meme where a cheeky individual attempts to pass off the chemical makeup of an apple as that of a vaccine. While looking at the list of hyphenated, long-winded names, I fact-checked the chemical composition of an apple, expecting to find a simple source. Instead, I discovered decades of research dedicated to thousands of species of apples and their chemical complexities. Surprisingly, the study of apples happens to be a (don’t mind the pun) fruitful field of study.

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misciwriterseditors blog, RNA2022

Dr. Wendy Gilbert: The 5′ UTR region of mRNA controls gene expression

Live Blogger: Emily Eberhardt

Editor: Christian Greenhill

This piece was written live during the 6th annual RNA Symposium: Towards our Future of RNA Therapeutics, hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center for RNA Biomedicine. Follow MiSciWriter’s coverage of this event on Twitter with the hashtag #umichrna. 

Dr. Wendy Gilbert’s lab Twitter biography is simple: We love RNA. However, the intricate details of mRNA specific regulation are complex and tightly-regulated. Dr. Wendy Gilbert starts her presentation with a bold image of a female superhero with the title “Control.” It is immediately clear that she is passionate about her lab’s research and seeks to understand the control of mRNA regulation in the process of translation. Dr. Gilbert has good reason to be interested in better understanding this process, as misregulation has dire consequences: heritable diseases and cancer. 

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