CharonY

Well, not surprisingly as I assume that BBC does not regularly employ microscopy experts in their staff. I am pretty confident that I will get higher sensitivity with a LC-MS than, say CNN's most active Twitterers..

Huh? Nanoparticles or dispersion into nano-sized particles have been under investigation as vehicles of direct drug delivery for quite a while now. How does that connect to homeopathy?

Though I am pretty sure that such a publicity stunt can easily backfire. In the worst case it will be seen as an admission of guilt (those terrorist are indeed part of our community, sorry about that). And even if it is not the case it could be seen as, well, a publicity stunt, especially if it was conducted by an islamic organization. It would be better if they created a neutral help fund for whatever, earthquakes, crime victims and so on rather on concentrating on terrorists. I am pretty sure that it will only reinforce the already strong associations.

So you want to compare all your genes to one reference gene? In that case you should normalize it down to gene copies, e.g. using defined amounts of genomic DNA (though you should know the copy number per genome). Normalization against PCR efficiency usually does not yield good results as the run-to-run variability is quite high. In any case these estimations will not be very accurate. qPCR in general is not too good of a tool for comparing expressions of different genes. It is much more suited to compare the different amount of a single sequence.

Well, the ability to take in criticism is not wide-spread.

Also if muslims started to help out victims of terrorist attacks they may actually appear more guilty to the public. If they are not in any way connected to terrorists, why should they make amends?

Just as a sidenote, I just now found the following paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008320 They describe a tool with which one can play around to see temperature changes and models. Here is the tool: http://climatewizard.org/

There are only few that have an open peer review, and even then it is mostly voluntarily. Besides that you will have to check the journal, as Klaynos said. If they do not describe a review process, it is not peer-reviewed. Also a number of database (e.g. Pubmed) only list paper from peer-reviewed journals.

The most important information is missing. What do you want to compare? If you want to compare the expression of a single gene under different conditions, for example, you would do all your runs for each gene individually. Comparing the expression of different genes requires more normalization and is generally still relatively imprecise. The second question is how you want to do the normalization. With a dilution series you essentially can see the dynamic range of your assay and it gives some limited information about the efficiency, but as you do not know with what you start, its use is limited. For a calibration curve one usually takes a known quantity (most often genomic DNA). If you want to compare a single gene e.g from different extractions, you have to run them all in one go, but you do not need the dilution series. It will only tell you at which point (e.g. 10-fold dilution of your reference extraction) the response will become useless (i.e. is outside the dynamic range). So based on what you are saying is that you are not able to detect anything at 10-fold below your reference. Essentially always keep in mind what your reference for any given assay is as you will have to compare everything against it. Also cross-comparison between different genes is tricky and generally not recommended.

Again, you are starting from the wrong assumption. Sequence based functional analysis was made possible by sequence databases. Before they were present you had to do e.g. reversed genetics, as mentioned above. In other words, you figure function first and then proceed to identify the sequence in question.

Back on the Amiga, yes. Their finest hour was nice in terms of dogfights.

OK. So if you got time I would like to take out your brain and try to build a search engine based on that.

Thanks iNow. Based on some of the thread titles it does not appear to be much of a different level than it is here, though. And why am I not surprised that I got a link from you? Have you indexed the net on your harddrive or something?

Somewhat off-topic but I was was wondering whether anyone knows a hard science forum for life sciences? One that goes beyond protocol swapping, that is?

I know that I can move threads (I have not yet moved something to the speculations section yet´, though). But I was actually really asking for opinions as whether it should stay (for whatever reason). But apparently it has become a joke thread instead. Hmmm.

Congrats. Well, it depends really on who is in there, how interested they are and so on. The viva to viva variation (or the equivalent in other countries for that matter) is, as Severian pointed out, usually very high. Now go and find a career, the fun time is over now

Iron poisoning is rather unlikely as the concentration is simply not high enough. As already mentioned, blood tends to be very low concentrated on other nutrients as well. Much data can be found in studies about vampire bats, btw.

It is neither fair, legitimate, about evolution, or a doctoral dissertation to begin with.

I am not sure to which you are refering to, but e.g. the Mann paper from 1998 in Nature gives info regarding the calibration, as well as where they got their data. Usually the data or in case of extremely large sets (as here) the references for the data are given in the supplementary materials.

Switzerland has, as I recall it, a very base-driven democracy. Results like this (i.e. most likely more emotion-driven than rational) are one of the consequences...

I think I have an account there, too. But as I did not find anything interesting in the biology section either, I decided not to stay there. Here at least I can enjoy Mokele's posts.

The hard part is that biology PhDs have strong competition from a lot of other disciplines (e.g. biochemistry, chemistry, pharmacology, medical sciences, bioengineering etc.), when it comes to jobs. In many cases the competition is better suited to industry needs, too. Biology is a bit too much of a jack-of-all-trades. The thing you have to keep in mind is that you do not need to find a position doing precisely what you did. Companies expect you to learn as you go along. To leverage from your education as much as possible you can look for sequencing and sequencing related companies and next-gen is still hyped right now (though it is becoming more mainstream by the minute). Remember, however, that you are not bound to do precisely what you studied. Just use your education as the primer as most companies expect you to learn on-job anyway. Many biology students (and also PhDs) do not apply to certain jobs as they feel that they do not fulfill all criteria, but especially on the masters level a certain switch (e.g. towards a more IT related field) can be explainable. Just make sure to justify it properly and emphasize any strengths (e.g. programming abilities) that you may have gained. I have an inkling what the future of biology will be, but I think it will be a lengthy essay. Also it of course depends on whether we are talking about biology in academia or in real jobs. In the latter biology always had problems, due to what I mentioned above (as well as a number of other issues).

Ugh, can we move that out of the evolution section? It makes my eyes bleed.

I have no precise figures at hand, but the rejection rate in the top-tier journals like Science and Nature tend to be around 80%. Most actually without being peer-reviewed, but directly rejected (out of scope or insufficient impact). I do not know how many of those actually sent to review are still getting rejected. I assume the rate to be much higher, too (based on what I am hearing).

I would put emphasize on the IT elements of your studies, and try that angle. There are companies in the biotech area (especially sequencing related) that hire bioinformatic masters for data analysis or software development. Especially the latter is still a somewhat good market. If you know that you do not want to go the PhD route, then do not. Mathematics is not really an important factor in business, per se.