CharonY

There is a limit to what biological synthesis pathways can do. But keep in mind that they have, by definition, be products that can be gained from biochemical reactions. Artificial polymers as plastics for instance, can therefore generally not be produced by them. They can degrade many of them though and thus changing their properties.

We are incredibly far out. In fact, so far out that now more than ever questions arise whether it is possible at all. Increasing the panel size is a hotly proposed element, yet there is a lack of evidence that it will help at all. Practically it may just lead to even more overfitting issues. Personalized medicine is also one of the hip buzzwords (and admittedly I used it more often that I felt comfortable with) that is even more complicated. This is the same with basically all omics based approaches (which is more my field). I believe that we are at a point where we have all these cool postgenomcis tools but we have to start asking how to employ them properly. The initial answer in the nineties was "hire bioinformaticians and let them sort it out" but clearly this cannot and did not work. It is thus the duty of biologists to step back, maybe take a look at other disciplines and figure out how the experiment has to be conducted to yield significant information (rather than just look for differential expression, for instance) and, maybe by taking a more reductionist approach for starters, clearly define what would could be considered a significant information (rather than wading through and cherry picking things in the data moat). Heck, if I get the funding this is what I would do...

You are right. Contamination generally occur after the egg is opened. It is also noteworthy that egg white contains lysozyme, an enzyme that cleaves the beta-glycosidic bonds between N-acetylmuramic acid and N-acetylglucosamine of bacterial cell walls.

What bascule said. The job for the public affair guys is, unfortunately, not necessarily accurate science reporting. That is what journals are for. I do have to add that some really try to balance it out somewhat.

There is a problem (in the whole area of biomarker research), though. The more complex it is the less likely a significant association can be found. Or rather the associations are likely to be false positives. There are a lot of reasons of course, and not all of them connected to sample size (although this is a huge issue). For complex diseases it is also tricky to characterize the samples properly, for instance. For these and more reasons GWAS (as well as other high-throughput biomarker) studies have come under fire and there is an ever stronger call for finding mechanistic connections, instead. While some propose that throwing more data at the problem will help (calculations are indicating sample sizes of around 10-100k). Personally, I am not that sure.

There are different tracks in different companies. However quite often the scientist track (sci I, II,III etc or similar nomenclature) tends to be less desirable than the management side, especially in terms of income. Unfortunately I am less familiar with the management track and do not know whether a MS/MBA is sufficient. From what I have heard a MBA is more valuable if backed with job experience. But then those are hard to get in academia. I good bet is to look for positions right now to get an idea what kind of positions are offered for MS/MBAs and use that as a starting point.

I like it as a supplement, but clearly not as a replacement of textbooks. One problem (but there is essentially the same as with high school or even some college textbooks) is that it can only semi-accurately incorporate those elements that are well known, and even then not in too much detail (considering the gaps of knowledge or in-depth accuracy that still exist).

Also, at least up until last year at least McCain was also against the use of national guard troops in enforcing border security. I guess the rise in violence made him rethink that, though. Edit: I think there was a trial run with virtual fences but they were found to be too expensive and ineffective. IIRC they weren't able to distinguish between animals and humans, for instance. Subsequently funding for that was eventually cut.

The funny bit is how much impact it has on news outlet each time he announces that he created artificial life. It is like everyone forgot that he said it last year, too. And if they manage to change something I guess that in 1-2 years it will be there again. I guess the same discussion will be on again (also here).

There are a number of depositories for "healthy" samples (mostly body fluid). Main problem is usually that depending on the study the definition of healthy may be off. Due to the low frequency of many genetic diseases the sample size for the disease samples are often too low and biased.

So far nobody ever managed to create a working synthetic cell.

I am actually not sure whether a mechanism is known. Bacterial infections have been implicated in atherosclerosis, but I cannot recall how strong the link was, never mind the actual mechanism.

My bad. It should have been 25 µg, not 5.

You do not add a concentration of EtBr, but you add a certain amount into a volume resulting in a given concentration. Your stock of EtBr has 5µg/µl. You took out 5µl which is a total of 5µg. Then divide that amount by your final volume to get the concentration.

Well, that is what domestication of animals did.

A nice cartoon regarding Wakefield (the guy who "found" a link between autism and vaccines): http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

Ah yes, the good ole it is natural hence it must be good theory. Yes the original atmosphere was pristine and wonderful. Well, no oxygen, but hey, who needs that? Also CO2 is good because it makes plants grow. If you'll excuse me, I am going to take a bath in lava.

Except X-ray crystallography, which is usually found in the realm of protein biochemistry or structural biology rather than biophysics there are few techniques that let you see protein structures (at least not as a whole). Measure properties (as e.g. binding forces) yes. But structures not so much. Bioinformatics is a broad field and deals with loads of stuff that are way out of the realm of biophysics. A direct comparison does not really make sense for the most part.

Well, also note that as a PhD with time one often tend to do less and less actual research and more managing (depending on the tracks available in the company, there are large differences out there).

I saw in the news that if you claim to be an US citizen, they are not allowed to detain you. If they find out later that you have been lying they may prosecute you with criminal charges. However, I do not know what would prohibit anyone from claiming citizenship. I am not sure how accurate the local news are, though. Padren, according to the bill the stop, detention or arrest have only to be in conjunction with the enforcement of a law of ordinance. Essentially violations of a law (as stated in the arizonaguide) do not have to have occurred yet.

Edit, I merged the threads.

Nope, I was referring to thermodynamic models which are up stepping from known folds. Simulations on naked sequences have been unsuccessful, I agree. There are also those that actually calculate atomic interaction bottom up, but there are so computationally expensive that at best short peptides have been modeled (to my knowledge). They are mostly used for lipid models and similar. However, they appear to be fairly accurate (after running for a year or so....)

Dolly had its nucleus exchanged, bacteria have been cured from major portions of their genome for a long time (in fact it is so established, I used it as part of undergrad projects). It is essentially a large cloning project. The important part that is not mentioned is that the DNA alone does not define the lifeform but the interaction with the surrounding cells is also crucial. Guess why they used two closely related bacteria instead of just putting it into E. coli? Artificial life would truly be artificial if the recreate the whole cell, not just manipulate DNA. It would have been slightly more interesting if they took a different cell and put the Mycoplasma genome in there.

It is simply an upscaling of things done for decades. The technical feat is impressive but it is neither new nor does it contribute to scientific knowledge. Ecoli, I agree. And it worked well, too.

Quite honestly I do not see too much new compared what they already sold on Mycoplasma earlier. The only difference is that with using existing techniques they generated a long DNA sequence, rather than extracting and modifying. It is a continuation and, as in the other threads, I still maintain that it is not artificial life. The time and work investment is more notable than the actual scientific progress gained by it.