CharonY

OK, this does not even begin to make sense. Here some random info: Split between the ancestor of apes and elephants was around 100 mio years ago. To put that into perspective, the split between the rats and primates occured ca. 10 mio years later. Accordingly, elephants belong to a different subgroup of Eutheria (Afrotheria), than primates ( Boreoeutheria).

I am pretty sure developmental factors are being investigated. I would not say that it is the cost of evolution, but rather the cost of complex multicellularity.Obviously unicellular organism have different restraints on their growth than those that have to coordinate with others in a highly complex fashion. That is in fact something that evo-devo people are looking into.

Well, as you have indicated, your experiment basically failed as you were not able to enrich Gram-positive bacteria. As you pointed out correctly, EMB is slightly selective for Gram-negative. Now for what are the other two plate selective. As a sidenote I want to point out that normally these plates are not 100% selective as there are always bacteria that can withstand the selectivity. But of course, for the course appropriate bacteria will have been selected. Now back to topic. What you could do is think whether one of your plates may have Gram positive bacteria and then streak them out on the selective plates again. Of course, if you got clean colonies you can make dilution streaks and then characterize a clean colony from there.

Regarding science, as a scholar I cannot feel anything but being humbled by the realization of how little we really know about nature. And being humble and having a sense of humility is an excellent mindset to start learning. If you start off with the attitude that you know everything, you are likely to learn nothing.

And yet they are still the vast majority in the respective countries. Do you claim that there is currently a white overcrowding going on?

Good point. Also in most papers the authors would at least describe their algorithm so it is not a complete black box. In fact, I wonder what kind of article would get away with that. Of course, the actual code could have (either by design or by error) actually implement things differently than described. Take BLOSUM62 for instance, which is a standard substitution matrix for sequence alignments and database searches (e.g with the famous BLAST). Interestingly, it is actually based on erroneous calculations. And in this case the source code for the calculation of it was open source. Yet it took more than a decade for people to realize that. One of the reason may be that the erroneous matrix actually performed better than the correct one. It will depend a lot on the respective fields, but especially in bioinformatics I assume that mandating open source or not is not going to be much of an impact, especially considering that many already are, but few will bother to give them closer scrutiny. Also, some are commercializing their respective algorithms, which could make things more tricky. In the end, the performance is evaluated using test runs, and if they do not perform, they vanish.

Precisely. Also you can just use restriction enzymes and then blunt the ends for blunt end cloning (hence omitting PCR). Also there are vectors that allow T-A ligation (as Taqs usually introduce a A overhang).

I could believe that laws are being ignored, but can you source that there are only few laws to begin with? Also few on what level? That being said, considering population size China produces (still) less CO2 per capita, for instance (ca. 7 mio tons vs 5 mio total emission, respectively). Also with other pollutants there is the issue that much of China's industry is localized in relatively small areas. There the pollution is very high, though areas in the US with high pollutation rival it for certain pollutants, at least based on some older data (I did not have time for an extensive search). My link While I agree that large countries like China and India are pivotal to curb pollution, it is a bit disingenuous to play down the roles of the US or EU. Especially as many of the industries in China are producing goods for the US market.

There are several issues with that from a biological viewpoint. For instance, you will find different mosquito species in different regions. So the virus or whatever would have to survive the digestive passage of very different species, which is somewhat tricky. The easiest would be spread by aerosols between humans (e.g. by body fluids such as saliva) with a long incubation time.

The differences are allele variations. We carry essentially all the same set of genes, but different variations thereof.It depends a little on what you look at and how you count differences, though. If you compare the naked sequence, for example, you can expect an average difference of around 0.1% for any given stretch of DNA between any two humans. I.e. one base exchange for each 1000 base pairs. So by that measure it is closer to 99.9%. However, copy number variation, e.g. duplicates of certain regions, may increase the variance, up to around 0.5%, IIRC. But all measures would point to difference well below 1% for any two individuals.

AFAIK the rules indicate upper limits of hazardous substances. It is not an outright ban of all hazardous materials at any concentration (which is hardly feasible), but an effort to limit it. Since the manufacturers are self-reporting, it is not quite clear how effective it is going to be in reality. CFLs have only roughly 3 mg of mercury per bulb. That is roughly the amount of mercury in 3 kg of fish.

Actually it is more closely to an undulating movement (in octopus) rather than a true rotary motion.

I think this is also not quite a correct viewpoint. Or rather thinking in terms of who needs whom more is rather moot. They are adapted to the environment that we provide for them. If we were not there, they would (to state the obvious) be no gut bacteria. In a way it is just an association that just happened, they adapted to us and we adapted to them. Due to selective pressures the whole systems is remarkably well balanced, especially considering the competing interests. Regarding energy balances I was thinking that you may want to look at comparative analyses of ruminants to other grass-feeders. I am sure there is something around and that showed the increase in nutrient adsorption after that prolonged fermentation with bacteria in the digestive system of ruminants, and how much energy they gained from it. Although in this case there is of course a much stronger dependency to bacteria (and other symbionts) in nutritional terms than it is for e.g. humans.

I do not think that there is that much competition with the host with regards to overall biomass under normal conditions. We are not terrible efficient in nutrient absorption so in most situations the amount consumed by bacteria is not that much, also nutrients are not necessary lost after consumption by bacteria. So I presume that looking at energy balances, you will find that we loose more to excretion than to bacterial consumption (i.e. looking a colonized vs non-colonized guts that is). In addition a major contributing factor to control bacterial colonization of the small intestine (as here the majority of nutrient absorption occurs) is bowel movement. As such it is actually not wasteful but necessary to control bacterial growth and density. However, sometimes overgrowth occurs (in clinical settings it is referred to as small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), which has been linked to certain micro-nutrient limitations. Other than that of course the gut is susceptible to direct invasion by pathogenic bacteria and toxins.

Well, what do you think? Considering that you wondering that you must have some kind of idea, right?

There is no anti-bovine serum per se. It is used as lab lingo but technically that nomenclature is incomplete. What is meant are anti-bovine serum antibodies. In this case, antibodies are raised against bovine serum. Thus, bovine serum is the the target of that particular set of antibodies (usually polyclonal and the actual component target within the serum may not actually be known).

The sterilization is, at best, incomplete. A bit always comes through and even a sterilized gut will be colonized over time. Two things. Fist of all, in a sterile environment we are likely to be able to survive without gut bacteria. Studies on mice showed that while in some cases they provide benefits, they are not essential. However, once you are outside, you will be colonized. The protective part is if you manage to establish a flora that does not kill you. The symbiotic relationship is essentially by passive protection, so to say. Regarding the co-factors that we are not able to synthesize anymore: it was the other way round. First we needed a decent gut flora to protect us from getting killed by whatever we shove down our throats. Then it became unnecessary to synthesize stuff as the gut flora is doing it for us. Again, the most useful function for us is them colonizing all niches to (hopefully) outcompete harmful bacteria. A more proper similarity to bioreactors can be found in ruminant digestive systems, for example. From the bacterial viewpoint, they do not bloody care that they are efficient. The maximize their own fitness. Overall, I think the viewpoint of a bioreactor (optimizing a process with disregard to fitness of the producer) is not quite helpful to understand human-gut flora-interaction. We are, as a whole, a very diverse ecosystem for bacteria. They are colonizing us and, if the ecosystems is somewhat balanced, provide mostly passive, and some active benefits. As long as we do not die they have something to grow in. And potentially they also benefit from us procreating (as they can put their progeny into ours). If we somehow reduced their fitness (i.e. by a design that would optimize it to our benefit), they would be immediately outcompeted by other bacteria that do not have that limitation (and could potentially make us sick). In other words, we are pretty much not in direct control of our flora, similar that a forest does not control the animals living in it. We just live together and hope that everyone benefits, balancing the fitness between all involved partners.

Shoot, forgot to give the comments. It is fine anyway, congrats.

This tool is dependent on the availability of genetic information in these species. Aah, known ancestors. That is a different thing, of course. Unfortunately it is not really my field, but from the data we are looking at an Hominoidea ancestor around 18-20 Mya. I am not sure whether fossils have been found, to give it a name. A related earlier fossil is represented by Saadanius hijazensis (around 24-29 Mya, IIRC). Of course it is not easy to state whether this species is precisely the common ancestor, or just related to it.

For the above reasons your question cannot be answered the way you phrased it. However, if you can check up timetree to find out when the lineages split.

Making up laws qualifies for speculations. In short, premise is wrong.

Nope. And if you re-read your own statement it would be pretty clear that these pathways are absolutely not related to what the authors imply.

We do can trace back lineages using existing species. We just have little information (in some cases) regarding the precise nature, physiology etc. of all our ancestors. Which makes sense, of course as they are long dead and extinct. And , if we had the genomes of the respective species (which we don't as they will have degraded by now), we could estimate relationships.

Using molecular clocks you can estimate the time of the split. Check timetree, for example.

If we take epigenetic effects into account things are more complicated, true. However, the likelihood that random surgery would target specific epigenetic changes that are propagated into reproductive cells is very low. The reason is that most epigenetic markers are not found in eggs and sperm, as it would invariably interfere with embryo development. The chances for targeted manipulations are almost non-existent based on what little we currently know. Note that the description of the OP does not resemble a typical situation of epigentic inheritance.