CharonY

Uh, two-year necromancy?

There are numerous issues with that with one being liability. If you get injured on the job you are generally taken care of. But if you are not actually on the job, but it happens in the facility, well that is going to cause problems. Another one is security. If you are not on the job your access to certain areas will be automatically revoked for the time. Again, it would be a liability issue when someone has access to dangerous, classified or similar material while technically not being on the job. Tangential to federal wages: I vaguely remember a CBO report indicating that below a masters the federal compensation (wages+benefits) are on average higher than in the private sector. At masters and above the trend reverses. One of the reasons I presume is that federal agencies are not able to squeeze untrained labor that well (i.e. there probably regulations to limit use of part-time or temp worker that go without benefits). Instead they have to outsource to companies that do that. Still, missing paychecks on the lower bracket will hurt, no matter what.

Federal programs that are deemed essential will continue, this will include staff that keep expensive machinery running, from what I heard. Most labs are likely to have reserve funds to pay people internally. However, researchers working on federal programs are likely to be furloughed.

I think this misses the broader topic. The fact that faculty positions are replaced by adjuncts and the fact that the latter are paid a pittance for their work. This is especially an issue in humanities as there are not as many postdoc type positions which are also a type of waiting position for until one decides to seek a different career or finally lands that tenure track position. However, postdocs are at least paid better (though not terribly much all things considered) and they get benefits. The big issue is that adjuncts have basically no say in this matter and the question is whether forming an union (which in some cases is not allowed) would improve that situation. In many ways the career path of a scientist is often broken (as compared to a "normal" career) with many abusive steps in-between, if one is unlucky. The situation is only going to get worse with more and more students and graduates and less funding for science and teaching.

First of all, as the name it implies it is is not a structural protein but an inhibitor of a serine protease. Also polymorphisms are not anomalies, there are simply genetic variants of a particular gene. The vast majority of existing alleles are do not result in dysfunctional proteins, as they would likely be selected against and thus eliminated from the population. Allelic variants can have different properties in terms of expression or activities, though.

I think dementia (and their causes) should go high on that list, too. Especially if friends and family is involved it is in some ways worse than cancer. At least in the latter case the person you know and love is still there to the end. And it is really bad when the person has moments of clarity and realizes his/her situation.

I realized that I misread the post. For some reasons I assumed that that the primer were derived from chicken rather than cauliflower, which pretty much invalidates my post. In that case it really depends on the primer how to interpret what you see. I.e. what area is targeted as they are highly conserved regions in beta-actin genes which could yield identical results across species. I.e. using the correct primers you could either amplify a region that is conserved across species or specific for only closely related ones. For that you would have to know what fragment size to expect. Considering that you ran a high-percentage gel (as seen from the marker) I now suspect that the smaller fragment is indeed the expected one. As there is a bit smear up to the top, is it possible that you either contaminated or had a large amount of DNA in your PCR reaction? The alternative is, as Tridimity mentioned unspecific amplificates (of greater length that is).

I would actually be surprised if there are any structural differences. On the extreme ends of the spectrum (of whatever parameter we are testing) I would expect maybe slight differences in the activation patterns (e.g. due to the way a problem is being perceived and subsequently solved) but I am not certain that there would be anything detectable on the (sub-)cellular level, for instance.

Why do you think that this is a Southern? The simplest explanation is unspecific amplificates. Note that the size is fairly low (in the low 200). If the run was not stringent enough there can be some products there. Note that there is something even lower, which are likely primer dimers (depending on their length). Of course there is also always the risk that there are just by chance sequences somewhere that allow that. But considering you see them in both I am pretty sure that they are typical artifacts. They are also stronger in the cauliflower because the specific target is missing that would outdilute the primer for the PCR reaction.

It is possible to grow certain neural cultures. The key is often onbtaining them from (rat) fetuses or very young rats. In these cases hippocampal cells can be stimulated to grow and proliferate. Hoever, in contrast to immortalized cell lines there is only a limited life time to them (afaik).

The protocol is not quite clear to me. What precisely do you with "the bacteria are not growing after I incubate them for three hours."? Do you mean after harvesting the bacteria from plate or liquid medium and incubating them in pure buffer? If so did you grow them again in media (full/minimal?). The source of the confusion is that incubation also refers to regular growth conditions. And thus is kind of contradictory.

Precisely. Trying to replicate this on the cell line level is needlessly complicated.

As an update to the Syrian chemical weapon stocks: Source

It should also be added that the sugar found in e.g. apple is not purely fructose, though it reaches around 50% of the total (simple) sugar content. Other sugars do include gluclose, sorbitol and sucrose, for example.

You are preaching to the choir here. Quiote a bit of my work is in the area of proteomics and single cell analysis and there is quite a lot of things going on that are hard to interpret. I am convinced that more fundamental cellular research is necessary before we can properly interpret and intervene in cancer processes. Unfortunately the funding agencies are more focused on the applied side. At least hypoxia investigations have gotten some traction lately, but I feel a more integrative approach is needed. That is probably quite a different discussion, however.

What? How do these two things relate to each other? We do have neuronal cell lines, which are clonal, but obviously this is quite a different goal than to clone an organism. To enucleate a neuron without damaging is likely to be trickier than a germ cell line, but again, what would be the purpose of it? If you want to have clones of a cell it is easier just to grow them. In addition to what Ringer said, also proteins for general metabolism, energy conservation etc.

This is blatant nonsense. You could use the same argument to argue that chimpanzees were made by aliens. In essence it is a proud display in failing entry-level genetics. But to answer OP: No.

To be fair, your description actually mixes different types of research directions. For example it is mostly microbiologists that look at biota, even in humans. There is certainly a certain overlap, depending on the aspects of human/microbiota interaction. Human genetics has usually different directions, some that may be medical, some that are not. But with few exceptions (a handful of groups maybe) there is little overlap. Also there is the question what you look at, e.g. genetics on the population level, or genetics on the molecular level. With regards to the the actual career, most fundamental biomedical research is conducted in universities. Some is done in companies, usually for applied research (including development of products). Research teams may contain technicians (usually master's degree) as well as researchers with a PhD. In academia there are few permanent positions that are mainly involved in research. Most tenured positions involve heavy teaching loads. And these are usually very competitive. Being actual in the lab tends to be a phase during your career that you have to grow out of to a certain extent (unless you go the technician route).

To further iNow's point, he decidedly rejected the notion of a personal god and considered himself mostly an agnostic.

Well, if we had one on this forum this thread would cause him/her to die from a raging hemorrhage.

Some companies do have grant-like system where several developer groups have to submit a proposal, but many are directly funded. In any case, this is generally applied research where they e.g. develop or improve their product lines. I would not think that they would would cut much out if they want to have a new product line to sell in the coming year(s). It should be stressed that the report is not about general research and science.

As I mentioned, that is patently not true. The regulations in most European countries with mixed models the regulations for the private insurers are stricter that in the US. And there are often also rules that inhibit switching so that people cannot game the public system. Only recently did the US have a minimum what has to be insured, for example, whereas that was always the norm in the European system (at least those that i have a passing knowledge of). Looking at balance one could say that in most (all?) European countries the decision power on health care is under governmental oversight. In the US the industry holds a significant amount of power. Private insurance is therefore more in private hands in the US than in the other countries.

Well, at the minimum you would need a nitrogen source and some other precursors are needed.

If that was supposed to mean that it somehow involves sex chromosomes, then no. PAI is on chromosome 7.

Actually, if one wants to look at fancy energetics, one should not look at animals or plants, but at bacteria instead. They pretty much figured everything out that is energetically possible. Now if you focus on respiration and use methane and hydrogen analogous to water and oxygen then it is clearly energetically impossible. You cannot get energy out of that the way you can from oxygen (essentially like willing a ball to rolll up a hill on its own). That being said, there are ways bacteria either produce or consume hydrogen or methane to survive. As mentioned, some are able to use hydrogen as electron donor (and then something else with a higher redox potential as acceptor). And as in the above example hydrogen production is used to regenerate reduced compounds (ferredoxins, NAD+) that are needed for substrate-level energy generation. For methane we have also something. Methanotrophes are also able to use methane as electron donor (and also carbon source) . Then we have methanogenesis. In these cases methane is emitted as a consequence of the final step of the electron transfer chain (i.e. analogous to the water production in oxygen respiration). In this case electrons are transferred generally to either acetate or CO2. As you can see, hydrogen and methane are only usable really at the front end of energy generation (i.e. electron donors) or are produced as a side aspect of respiration/fermentation processes. Both cannot be linked in a chain to yield energy. It is a bit like placing a ball on a flat surface and willing it to accelerate. However, with additional components it is possible to sustain life with these as core processes (as we have on Earth). Just the analogous use of hydrogen -> oxygen and methane ->water does not make much sense. Typed this in a hurry so it may not be easily understandable. Need coffee.