CharonY

That could be the case and would make more sense than my interpretation (note: I did not neg rep the comment). That being said, it is quite well known that ABs have various toxic effects on the body (though obviously generally less than a severe infection). At the current point I do think that the gut biota is slightly overrated in their impact (it just happens to be a thing right now) considering that is getting modified quite a bit by your diet alone, for example.

Homepathic as in traditional or herbal remedy, or as in pure water?

I think that may be not one of the strongest worries as the dose you get from environmental AB contamination is quite low. The biggest issue is really the spread of AB resistance.

Pretty much the whole field of epidemiological research has these issues. Considering that it still exists probably means that these are not unattractive to researchers.

Sorry, but this is precisely the kind of answer that annoys me. On the one hand it is nonsensical (what type of sugar, at which step and why the heck at all?) but is stated almost as a fact. While it is rather easy to dismiss in this case, in others it may very well confuse readers. That being said, quickly looking over the protocol and there does not appear to be huge issues. Two things that I noted are 1) A run of four bases is a bit on the short side (six or more tends to be safer). 2) Gel purification sometimes can result in low and damaged product (the latter if it is being illuminated on UV for too long), but other than that it is pretty standard. In my hands I tend to have more consistent results with column based purification. There are a suite of troubleshooting experiments that one could do to ensure that things work out as expected on every step (e.g. transfer intact vector, digested vector, re-ligated vector, etc.). It may be the case that either your digest/gel purification went very well or the yield was low as I would have expected at least a tiny amount of re-ligated vector.

You got it backwards. Life is not perfectly defined, but still used because it is useful.

I am not sure whether I understand the connection. Spreading of DNA horizontally is often driven by specific mobile elements but I do not quite get the jump from that to symbiotic interaction. In the case of mitochondria it is quite well established that there has been an extensive transfer of mitochondrial genes to the nuclear genome.

Well Apple has dropped the claim of virus safety a while back. It was a matter of time, considering that Macs have massively gained in popularity. The source of the claim is less that Macs are safer, but that the vast majority of computers are Windows systems and hence, more viruses are developed for them and there are more computers to spread them around. There are more exploits on windows systems, too, but mechanistically no system is immune. The likelihood of encountering a virus varies, though.

Accelerate over what? As the far as sole medium juice has the advantage of being usually quite rich in sugars and other nutrients, however it also has a low pH which inhibits growth for many microbes. So the acidity itself is more inhibitory than anything.

Fungus growing on some peel?

I think the test may be based on the fact that few fetal cells are found in maternal blood. While less invasive it is also quite trickier to do. However, I do not know what the potential error sources of this method are compared to more traditional sampling methods. Due to the sensitive nature of this issue I would advise you talk to the analysts directly. It should be noted that all tests have a certain error rate (obviously). It will also depend on what guidelines the lab follows to ensure that e.g. negatives are true negatives and not e.g. just a failure in their PCR (e.g. what did their positive control look like and have they done replicates, is it a certified lab, etc.). I should add that obviously an forums you will only find general info and speculations on paternity testing. What precisely went down should be cleared with the service provider and no advice or info on a web site should be taken as serious advice.

Do they have to be guests? I mean we can just show up at his/her doorstep and rant to our heart`s content?

It depends a bit on the test method, but to put it simple, any allele found in a child has to originate either from mother or from the father. Thus if a child as alleles that are not maternal but also not from the tested father, the biological father must have been someone else. Depending on how well the lab performs and whether repetitions were done, a single mismatch may be down to some measurement error, but eleven missing alleles would be very odd. A few matching alleles are almost always expected as we are all related to some degree with each other (i.e. these are just random hits). BTW, the way the procedure is described appears to be incomplete as you would need the DNA of mother, father and child. To get the latter a blood sample would not work as it would contain just the maternal DNA. Instead, generally amionotic fluid or placenta tissue has to be sampled. It may depend on the country, but I would assume that if these tests are used for legal reasons sampling must be done under controlled conditions, especially as the sampling of the child is not as trivial as after birth (where you can simple use a swab, for example). There may be other legal reasons involved, however. Once the sampling is done and assuming that it is done properly, the procedure is basically the same as for traditional tests, with the same level of inaccuracy and potential sources of error. Also, depending on what alleles are being selected certain populations may get odd results (e.g. when there is a high level of relatedness).

Except in the broadest sense (i.e. evolution and mechanistic reasons given by Endy) there is no simple true and detailed answer for this. To complicate matters, for many of the identified genes belonging to same family, many may not be functional. That is, they may not be expressed at all, carry inserts and so on. If someone asks a question like this, one does not expect a correct answer as in multiple choice questions,but it is rather used to gauge how much you understand basic topics (the answers could be different if asked from a evolutionary, developmental, physiological or e.g. genetic point of view). Instead, one would expect to give some kind of speculation that is well-founded in the material provided in class (bonus points if further sources are used).

What are the questions you have...?

Those things are quite hard to predict. It depends a lot on the precise structure of the given reductase, where the location of the cysteine is in question etc. The main point is that methionine does not form disulfide bonds, so that is likely to change the structure, but it depends which of the S-S bonds being disrupted, of course.

A good indicator if whether the journal is listed in the Thomsom indices and in the common databases pertinent to a given field (e.g. pubmed, but not google scholars).

The immune system does not work that way. It only ever recognizes parts of foreign particles (the antigens) it has no clue whether something is alive or not. Not quite. More like a function of how our immune system works. Essentially you want an equilibrium in which it is able to effectively recognize foreign particles but does not go overboard with its response or start attacking your own body. It has evolved under quite different conditions than we face today and may have therefore certain troubles with our lifestyle. Note that many symptoms (including fever, for example) are reactions of our immune system and are not necessarily due to pathogenic actions. While these symptoms are part of the important immune defense, it can overreact (therefore claims of things boosting immune systems tend to be dubious). Cytokine storms are an example where the immune response reacts so strongly to invaders that it may actually kill you (rather than the pathogen). Under these conditions a strong immune system could be a liability. Cytokine storms have been associated with deaths related to the swine flu, the SARS epidemic in 2003 and the flu pandemic in 1918.

I may be wrong, but I would think that it refers to the fact that the advancement of knowledge is so fast that within few years much has to be revised. It is not too different in many areas of molecular biology. If you want to stay on top of things you will have to constantly update your knowledge. A part is due to the fact that strong theoretical frameworks are still missing in those areas and many aspects are based on empirical data that. Resulting hypotheses have to be constantly revised as new experiments are being conducted.

No, that is just being silly (social Darwinism has little to do with Darwin, or reality for that matter). Living conditions for workers in the 19th century were horrid. The US got strong because they overcame (mostly) these issues rather because of them. Unless you believe that in direct comparison living in the 19th century would be better than living today in the US (hint: it is not). The US had historically a huge advantage over other countries when it came to curbing starvation (to a large extent due to the availability of fertile land relative to population size). In addition there were historically large amounts of labor shortages which made unemployment not too much an issue (though it did include indentured servitude). Incidentally, this changed somewhat throughout the mentioned 19th century, during which poor houses (for example) were on the rise. Poverty became a larger issue that was initially curbed by private activities including workers banding to help each others and rich people funding charities (partially fueled by the ideal of Nobless oblige, possibly). Still, life expectancy dropped significantly during the later half of the 19th century. This only changed during the 20th century, when improvement in economic and agricultural conditions (among others) helped to lessen the burden of poverty. To summarize, there were safety nets and severe need of them. They were not run by the government but almost entirely reliant on private funding (though I believe tax incentives were already in place) and they were ineffective in many places (though without them the impact on life expectancy would have been even worse). If this kind of dismal situations are correlated with strong nations, most countries (including most of Europe) should be much stronger than the US, as they faced much harsher issues when it came to starvation and economic issues...

Getting flu is not terribly common, if you live in an area that has low flu incidence and high amount of people that get vaccinated. Things start to get worse if more people decide not to vaccinate. Note that the way vaccination works is that it actually presents antigens to your immune system. I.e. you get the benefit of having your immune system respond to something, without suffering through the harmful effects of actual infection. What you may refer to is the hygiene hypothesis in which small exposure to antigens over time can lead to reduced allergic symptoms, as your immune system is actually occupied with things so that it won't trigger needless and harmful immune responses. For that however, it is most likely suffice avoid living in an overly sterile environment. This may include simple things like avoiding overuse of antimicrobial cleaners and getting out more often, though the details are still not clear about that one. Exposure that actually leads to illness is basically a bad idea, as it means that you got a dose that overwhelms you immune system. The best way are arguably doses that are sufficient to trigger immune responses but are below an infectious dose or variants that are less pathogenic. Incidentally, this is the principles with which vaccines work.

Horizontal gene transfer allows organisms to exchange genetic information, in some cases quite sizable amounts. If you happen to use these genes to infer phylogeny you would group them together, although they may be quite distant, for example.

There are quite a few of them. Do you mean open access? The main issue is to find one that fits the scope of your paper, however. Without knowing which area your work falls into it will not be terribly useful to list OA journals.

Pathogenic bacteria. Lots of them. Also other parasites.

Asthma is caused by an inflammatory reaction of your body. If your immune reactions are lowered, so may asthma attacks (depends a lot of the type and various other factors). Boosting the immune system would have most likely the inverse effect. In fact, influenza has been known to cause fatal asthma attacks. The key is that the mechanism of asthma are intrinsic. Something external may trigger it, but all the symptoms are caused by your body itself. There is nothing that an infection could help eliminating it (except if certain diseases lower your immune responses. The way you describe your symptoms are also more like a cold. Flu usually results in severe symptoms for 1-2 weeks. Also, just to make it clear, willful infection with influenza is a really bad idea. While rarely fatal in healthy individuals, the symptoms are usually crippling, not comparable to the few days bed rest you may need with common cold symptoms.