Dak

quite a few viruses yoink cell surface off of the cell that creates them. HIV, for example, is covered by cell-surface membrane from helper-t-cells or macrophages, with the addition of gp120 which it forses the cells to manufacture and plonk onto their membrane prior to budding. Yes indeed, that is what i meant. and tbh i was under the impression that all non-bacteriophage viruses had a cell membrane/lipid envelope (not saying im right, just saying i was unaware of any virions that dont steal host-membrane during budding). if my terminology was off, you can blame southern confort I meant the capsid being placed in the cytoplasm, but as mattbimbo said, it's not allways simple. viruses that have fusion molecules can 'inject' their capsid strait into the cytoplasm, those that enter via receptor-mediated endocytosis usually end up in lysosomes or the golgi apperatus (iirc) and have to 'break out' of there and enter the cytoplasm.

Sort of. Viruses generally have a molecule on their cell surface that is responcable for fusing the membrane of the virion and the cell, thus injecting the virion into the cell. The fusion molecule is usually designed so that it will only activate upon reacting with a certain molecule on the target cell's membrane. For example, HIV has a molecule called gp120 on it's surface; gp120 reacts with molecules called CD4 and either CXCR5 or CCR3, meaning that HIV infects helper-t-cells and macrophages (helper-t-cells and macrophages being the cells that have CD4 and either CXCR5 or CCR3 on their surface).

equilibrium (balance) is definately a sence. the inner ear is full of fluids and 'hairs', and the hairs detect where the fluid is. as the fluid will, by gravity, remain parralell to the ground, the inner ear gives a direct measure of your orientation with reguards to 'down'. Umm... not one of my best explanations, but you can probably see it quite clearly by half-filling a tumbler and tilting it. The knowledge of where the water level is and a bit of extrapolation tells your body how perpendicular it is. that's why you fall over if you spin round (the water carries on spining after you stop and screws your sence of balance). Not so sure that spatial awareness is a sence as such, more of a combination of different sensory imputs being stored in memory as a 3D knowledge of your surroundings, but thats on the assumption that sence = direct input from the outside, which may not actually be the case. I seem to remember hearing about a human sence of direction, having a small cumpas-type-thing in our brains similar to, but less developed than, that found in homing pidgeons, but im not too sure about that tbh. Also, 'touch', i believe, can be split into different sences -- temperature, pressure, and texture (?). but i suppose if your going to be pedantic you could split 'taste' into bitter, sour, sweet, salt, and umami... i guess it depends how you define 'sence'

Aww... that robot's cute

Cheers. I can't say ive thought about it that much yet (im gonna take atleast a year break first). I guess it depends on how good their genetic enginering/viriology departments are (which are my main interests). So... let me get this strait... people pay journals to publish their results, and then other people pay the journals so that they can read about them. sounds like the jourals are on to a good thing hmmm... do journals just print papers, or do they do other stuff like check results/lab books, repeat experiments etc? if it's just a case of printing, they could surely publish online and ignore the majority of the publishing costs?

dont journals pay you for your research?

both. briefly, the main benifits of using restriction enzymes against hiv is that the hiv would be unlikely to evolve resistance, especially if you use a 4-cutter. no matter how fast HIV evolves, its unlikely that it will, for example, be able to completlely remove the sequence GATC from its genome whilst retaining functionality. the main disadvantage is that the human genome is also made out of DNA, thus neccesetating a mechanism to protect the uninfected human genome from restriction. the four methods im speculating about are: 1/ HIV induced restriction enzyme gene, to act as a fast suicide gene upon hiv infection 2a/ something similar to ADEPT to target huge (too big to diffuse through the nuclear membrane) restriciton enzymes to CD4+ cells' cytoplasm, to restrict cytolic viralDNA whilst leaving nuclear dna alone in non-dividing cells 2b/ a gene for a large restriction enzyme that hooks into the cell-cycle regulatory gubbins, so that the level's of the restriction enzyme drop off leading up to nuclear dissolution during M-phase 3/whach a methylase gene into CD4+ cells, wait a bit, and then whack a restriction enzyme gene into CD4+ cells, so that they have a full-blown res/mod system, to restrict viral DNA whilst ignoring their own (methylated) dna. hmm... that's probably why i've run out of words without having done my discussion yet...

mixture between a literature reveiw and, i suppose, a thereoretical experiment outline. it (probably) wouldnt be possible to do as an actual experiment, due to the vast number of unknowns in the outline (ie, will restriction enzymes be faithfully transcribed by eukaryotic cells, is there a 4-methyl-cytosine glycolysate in humans etc), so i'm doing it (rather badly i fear) in dissertation form instead. "electrochemical method to characterise non-labeled biological affinity interactions"... does that mean a way of assessing wether, say, an antibody has bound it's antigen without having to label either of the molecules? If so, that'd be a pretty useful technique.

lol, you just want to use you'r l33t new moderation skilz I hear you there. A mixture of medical problems, uber-stress and stupidity meant that i didn't actually start the actual wright-up of my dissertation untill about a fortnight before it's due in (ie, last week). 'Argh-the stress' indeed. the title's "potential uses of restriction enzymes in the ablation of HIV infection/AIDS", and cheers for the offer of help but there's not really anyway anyone could help (plus, it'd be cheating) what's your PhD investigation (thesis?) on?

Assuming you ment plants: no theyre not. the existense of kingdom plantae is perfectly in accord with the ToE. Assuming you ment planets: no theyre not. the existence of planets has nothing to do with evolution. planets do not pass on their information, do not compete for limited resorses, and do not reproduce. ergo, planets do not evolve, and have nothing to do with ToE. The (unsubstansiated) 'fact' that most people who accept ToE aren't religiouse has absolutely no bearing on the ToE. the original encarnation of ToE also has no bearing on its current encarnation. and the presumption that life etc already existed is built in to the theory of evolution. first life likely emerged in a manner that was, at the least, significantly different from evolution as described by ToE. ToE makes no attempt to define first life (or the creation of planets for that matter), and merely accepts that they somehow came about at some point. it's not just adaptation... at least not in the manner in which i believe that you are using the word. change in allele frequency over time also describes emergence of new species from old, and thus gives a model of how contemporary life could have emerged from more basic, prokaryotic-esqu life. the point that i was trying to make is that it doesnt, for example, describe the creation of planet's. do planets have alleles? no. then ToE says nothing about the creation of planets. I doubt that the majority of people believe that ToE descibes the mechanism of the creation of planets. if they do, that might explain the trouble many people have accepting it. reguardless: what people believe is irellevent to what is actually the case. As Aardvark also asked, would you mind providing some example please? i've never before heard the suggestion that the situation you describe above is the case.

I'm currently doing by BSc dissertation. It's due in friday. To anyone reading: seriously, seriously, do not leave your dissertation or, presumably, your PhD wright-up to the last minute. under ANY CURCUMSTANCES! argh!

I know it's not a thermophil, but cant the bacteria found on rice -- B.Seriae or something like that -- survive boiling? hence why you shouldnt re-heat rice, 'cos after exposure to the water the rice-bugs reactivate, and if rice is boiled and then left around for hours, the toxins will build up and then you'll get ill, even if you reheat the rice? hmm... come to think of it, i think they might be bacterial spores actually...

on the other hand, variouse animals are culled by humans when their numbers rise too high, because otherwize they'd consume all of the local resorses and then, left with none, would die out. I dont see why humans should be any different. we'll die out, the same as any other animals, if we run out of resorses... maybe, if we were on the point of that happening, a cull would save us?

are you asking about apoptosis (sceduled cell-suicide) or phagocytosis (cell-eating, where partacles are injested into cells, resulting in vesicles containing foodstuff, which lysosomes fuse with to dijest)?

lucky that no-one trys to explain planetgenesis with the ToE then. on the contrary, the initial premises of evolution are entirely justified. the earth, the universe, and life exist, therefore they must at some point have been created. otherwize they wouldnt be here. quid pro quo. i'll state again that ToE conserns itself with HOW ALLELE FREQUENCIES CHANGE OVER TIME, including where new alleles come from, and, by extention, such things as speciation and adaptation/'improvement' over time. ToE does not make any comments on where the first life or earth came from. using a theory that relys upon the assumption that the creation of life/the earth somehow happened at some point to explain the creation of first life/the earth would be, well, silly. hence -- and i really want to hammer this home -- the ToE can 'plug in' to either abiogenesis theory, green-men-from-marz theory, or divine creation theory, as long as none of them are incompatable by saying, for example, that first life was created last tuesday. when, clearly, it wasnt. speaking of ToE 'plugging in' to other theories -- science has many theories that explain where first life/the earth etc may have come from. the fact that none of these theories are the ToE doesnt majickally invalidate the ToE. very well, and in agreance with empirical evidence sorry, i couldnt resist if they fit in with observable evidence and make sence, then they wouldnt be supernatural.

the dns cache does that (somewhat badly) on windows. the hosts file just stores url --> ip's that you enter into it... useful for 'hijacking' the process of looking up urls.

tbh, it's a pain in the arse to explain, 'cos the hosts file is stored in different locations on each version of windows, and (on XP at least), you need to go to inconvienient lengths to save the hosts file after editing it, and i'm not sure what you have to do to save the changes in non-XP versions of windows. so... id reccomend downloading the hoster. Simply run it, type in 38.118.74.97 http://www.scienceforums.com (note the space betwix the IP and the URL), and click 'add to hosts file'.

Add this to your hosts file 38.118.74.97 www.scienceforums.com and you'll be auto-redirected from www.scienceforums.com to http://www.scienceforums.net

The monopartite nuclear localization signal of autoimmune regulator mediates its nuclear import and interaction with multiple importin α molecules as i understand it, the above paper is saying that AIRE has a monopartite nuclear localisation signal just 3 amino acids in length (lys-arg-lys)... does that mean that if i stick lys-arg-lys onto the end of any protien, that it'll get concentrated in the nucleus? seems a tad small...

Oh, 'M' as in the latin for 1,000. So MM = one thousand thousand = 1,000,000. that makes sence, in a confusing kinda way Cheers Jim

really quick question: what does 'MM' mean, as in '$100MM'? I'm assuming 'million', but does the other 'm' stand for anything?

i believe that the current model is that SIV jumped to humans on atleast 5 seperate occasions to make HIV, 'cos of people eating monkeys. the HIV then spread through the heterosexual community, before jumping to the (at the time) promiscuouse and sexually unsafe gay communities in developed contries, then crossing over into the heterosexual community.

Cheers all