CharonY

Isn't that vertical thinking?

Ideally you should work with cultured bacteria rather than swabs. It is kind of tricky go get good lawn based on a swab, especially as you are going to have a very heterogeneous growth including fungi. Also, streaking often does not result in a nice lawn, diluting the bacteria into soft agar and pour it tends to work better, or dilute them into media and use a spreader (not deionized water, as some bacteria are not osmotically stable enough to survive that). The well method is more accurate than using droplets. Alternatively, use a sterile piece of filter paper (with defined size) and soak it in the compound to be tested.

IIRC it was named this way because it is a glycoprotein (gp) with a molecular weight of 120 kDa. gp120 thus became its name.

There are a lot of varying reasons. Many of which are not centered on humans of the only worthwhile animal on earth. But even assuming that everything should only be geared towards human survival (something that I do not subscribe to) then the question is what do we need to conserve the ecosystem or at least maintain it at a level that may sustain human life. Just keeping foodstock around is clearly insufficient.

a) With PCR you can only detect DNA and (after RT) RNA. b) Activity is dependent on concentration and activation status.

They won't slow down overall activity. They may interfere with digestion and, the ability to kill bacteria. But it won't result in a loss in the ability to take up nutrients, which happens later, anyway (if that is what you are thinking). Also the connection of nutrient uptake and metabolic levels is quite complex and also involves other external and internal factors.

Vaccine development is a long processes going through many phases. If you actually work on the bench you will rarely be involved in all of them. Especially the discovery/design phase will not involve animal tests. However, to me it looks more that you are interested in immunology or biomedical research rather than microbiology. The microbiology side will normally involve the analysis of e.g. pathogenicity mechanisms (as well as overall bacterial physiology). This may involve animal testing, but often cell models are used instead. Biology deals with how the organisms do certain things (i.e. more base research). Medical application usually comes from biomedical research. This knowledge may lead to the development of new treatments, but it does not has to. In short, you may be conflating various elements into a single career path, what you describe is, in effect covered by several different disciplines and career paths. You may want to look deeper into what each discipline is really dealing with, before making any decisions.

I am not sure what you mean. Burzynski has started selling his cure before he finalized all the required trials. There is no suppression outside normal regulation. Incidentally the data should be published soonish, and since most appear to be phase II (where efficacy is evaluated) one can see whether it works or not. What is slightly worrisome is that although some of the studies appear to have concluded quite a while ago, he so far only presented it on meetings but not yet in a publication. If that happens we will know more. I do not know the story about hydrazine sulfate, however a quick search in the Lancet did not reveal any studies showing effectiveness. Did they provide references?

This is somewhat misleading. The case was about whether terminally ill patients have the fundamental right to these treatments. In the end it was a constitutional question that had to be answered. Also it should be noted that no one is banned from trying alternative medicine. Unless it is harmful it does not fall under FDA regulation if it does not explicitly state that it heals cancer, for instance (that is, without passing the trials).

Well, because it is mostly nonsense. What may happen is that gases form in decaying bodies due to bacterial activities (mostly it is simply CO2). Lysosomes (which are organelles of eukaryotes, i.e. sub-cellular entities of your body) do not do that.

Sorry, maybe it is a wording problem, but I do not really understand your question. Do you mean which groups you need to join to work in these fields? Since many of the things you mentioned require a high level of mathematical training you really have to demonstrate that you are qualified. In more experimental and/or applied fields with intersection with biology, it is far more feasible to switch (or try to do the interdisciplinary dance, which is quite tricky to pull off).

In biology you need good statistics. Especially with high-dimensional data low statistical power and high false positive detections pose immense problems. Using Capn's example (and 10% "good drugs" is really very generous, the odds in reality are much lower) the likelihood of any given find to be really one of the good ones is around 10%. I.e. you are not better off than by randomly selecting a drug. Saves money on the study, though.

What Cap'n said. Basically a variation of the low number/rare event fishing game.

There are certainly also biological limits rather than purely physical ones. Gigantism is caused by a genetic mutation, for instance. Also for a longer perspective: My link

So, it sounds like a multiple-hypothesis testing type of problem?

Corpses smell due to the degradation products produced by bacteria and other microorganisms that are using the corpse as food. So basically what you smell are bacteria. If cells die, they tend to lyse, i.e. they burst and and the molecules just mix with their surroundings. So they do not leave corpses per se. There may be lipid residues (parts of their membrane) but they will usually be quickly utilized e.g. by other bacteria.

Just to reiterate, evolution, i.e. change of allele frequency over time is easily observable. Through which precise series of events a particular evolutionary outcome was reached is often not answerable. It is akin to see a speck of dust and asking how precisely it ended up there. You can e.g. analyze its composition to figure out its origin, check the wind to make reasonable guesses from how far it may have come etc. But you will not be able to reconstruct the events with absolute certainty.

Well, I think you need to be a bit more specific. Ecology preservation is not a job description as such. Green energy is quite a different beast, and so on. For instance in the area of green energy involves biological as well as non-biological technologies, there is basic and applied research, there are companies in that field that need anything from construction/design, sales, maintenance and so on. Maybe you should just check out a few companies and job advertisements and find the precise area you are interested in?

I am not aware of any exceptions. Even if not actively growing, transport proteins would be required for energy conservation. One of the hall marks of living cells is their ability to create and maintain a proton gradient. For that membrane proteins are indispensable.

I always assumed that it is the result of burning the organic substances.

Especially in biological sciences there is quite a high turnover in terms of textbook knowledge. This is generally achieved by a) introduction of new evidence that eventually b) leads to new consensus forming which then eventually c) diffuses into text books.

Horizontal gene transfer is a major element in the acquisition of pathogenicity functions. Many virulence factors are encoded in so-called pathogenicity islands, that have been acquired by HGT. For instance Shigella is considered a split from E. coli due to the horizontal acquisition of virulence factors.

Biolgoically, bacteria that utilize reverse TCA have specialized enzymes (including ATP citrate lyase and two different oxidoreductases) not found in the "normal" TCA-cycle to facilitate the reversal.

I was under the same impression. I can imagine that e.g. when considering extreme sizes the heartbeat may not be a good (or comparable) indicator of metabolic rate , likewise depending on the kind of metabolism different energetic constraints may apply. It fits well for mammals since they have got a very similar basic metabolism. This is even more complicated for animals with different life stages. The reproductive stage of some animals only lasts a few hours, for instance. Just as an example, mayflies have a heart rate of around 30 bpm (according to an old paper by Fox and Simmonds, 1932). However, they get away with that because diffusion plays a bigger role (due to their small size) plus their metabolic requirements i lower as e.g. do not need to maintain body temperature. Still they do not live longer than 3 years (all stages combined).

I am not sure whether this extends beyond mammals. However it indicates that energetics is a limiting factor (i.e. high metabolism inversely correlates with life expectancy). This does not hold water, even if the elders successfully compete with their youngs, on average they would still have more offspring with higher genetic identity to themselves.