CharonY

The "official" impact factor can be seen on the Journal citation reports by Thomson. You need institutional access to see them, though.

Well, it is not that surprising then. As it has been pointed out the expected IF depends highly on the field. An impact of around 2 appears not too high to me (i.e. an expected average of two citations per year). But then it depends on the pure amount of papers published to what actually gets cited (i.e. crap to gold ratio). A very small field can relatively high impact, if all the papers get cited. I recall that the highest for microbiological papers was around 4-5. Here papers in journals with impacts of lower 1.5-2 tend to be thought of as "crap" papers. Where I am currently working on (closer to the biomedical area) the breadth is even higher. The top includes journals like Cell, whereas the bottom can scratch around 1. So depending on the field the standards as what is believed to be acceptable varies (unsurprisingly) a lot. Also there is of course a difference in the evaluation between experimental and theoretical works even within a discipline. I do find it surprising if one low IF factor should have such an impact on hiring, unless of course there were either other reasons or it was the only distinguishing factor from other candidates.

Uhm, isn't its IF around 2? Or am I confusing it with something else?

Mononucleosis is caused by the infection with the Epstein-Barr virus. In the later phases it infects B-Cells. The infected B-cells in turn activate immune responses against them.

There is little reason to use GFP in Southerns. But there are uses for GFP antibodies. Search for that term, maybe in conjunction with Western and you should find something.

A postdoc is a transient position between PhD and whatever comes afterwards (usually some kind of professor in academia or company position in the real world). It is a bit of a limbo between having a degree and finally making a career. In other words one does not only become an ex-postdoc eventually (depending on country and system this may take anywhere from 6 months to several years), but one really wants to leave that part behind and work on a career instead.

1) as Mokele said. However, usually the corresponding author is making that request (in case it is not you). In addition, you may want to look at the journal policies. Some state their average review time and you may want to ask earlier in some cases. Depending on field and journal sometimes after three months a request can be reasonable. 2) You can always retract it, but if you submit somewhere else the process starts anew. You should not submit while it is still in review (for reasons already stated). In general it is customary to wait for the response of the review first and then decide to resubmit it or look for a different journal (depending on whether it accepted and the amount of changes/additional experiments required for publication). Fairness was never part of the equation. If you think this is bad then try to survive on grant money. But on average one tends to get the decision after 3 months (again, depending on journal). Personally, I had decisions as fast as one month and as long as four. Edit: Normally not. Also, reviewers are usually anonymous. Unless you become regular reviewer of a journal (as opposed as getting forced to write for an advisor). Then some write it on their CV (I do not, though).

That is a pretty good description, although many journals now have a sophisticated submission system (instead of email) that tries to prevents you from uploading relevant figures and tables or garbles up your main text (I assume that it tries to convert every third word into Chinese during the process). So that in the end you will have to give up and mail it anyway. Only to be referred back to the system. In addition, 15 has to be amended with: (you NEED to check every line for errors that they may have built in...) As already noted, most papers only accept papers that are not submitted elsewhere. In addition, you may end up with the same reviewer that will get pissed because they got the same article for reviewing twice. For many journals this is sufficient reason to reject the publication. Edited to add: It also depends on the field. Most natural sciences follow a similar scheme, but there are slightly different flavors.

In a number of disciplines there is virtually not glass ceiling beyond the master's degree. It depends on the company, of course, and what paths they offer. It would be worthwhile to research it for companies you might be interested in working for. I recall that the chemical industry still prefers PhDs but more computational dependent areas are also happy to offer paths for master's, for instance. You have to realize that a business degree itself is barely a job by itself, nor (similar to PhD) does it offer a job, unless you know the path you want to walk. Then you should check what you need to get there. At this moment it appears to me that you do the reverse.

I do not think that the info is in the article. It does not make sense, either way you look at it. The from the viewpoint of pure base pairs, the human genome is around 3 billion, bacteria around 3 million base pairs. Also on the gene level, average bacteria got around 5000, humans around 20k to 25k. Given the fact that bacteria have a lot of genes unique to their metabolism there is no way you could match up the genes to 90%. Depending on the metrics, humans have around 80-90% similarity to e.g. mice (fellow mammals). And as already mentioned, sequences are not unique to a species. e.g. humans share around 98-99 with chimpanzees, 90% with mice, whereas mice and chimpanzee also share around 90% with mice. Drawing this as a venn diagramm you will find that the majority is likely to be in the field shared by all three species.

Wait, wait wait. Writing up a lab protocol only requires the discussion of sources of errors during the experiment. Proposing a different experiment is not discussion but rather something like an outlook. The data itself does not say much, of course. the only thing you may want to look at is what one would refer to peak focusing. I.e. how collect your samples in less fractions to improve the resolution.

What precisely is new about this?

Please start off by stating what you expected to see. Take into account how size exclusion works (i.e. according to what parameters does it separate) and how gelatine and glucose differ in the respective parameter.

Could you rephrase this sentence a bit?

I think you will have to think about how a AFM force profile looks like a bit more. Assumeing you have the polymerase attached to the cantilever. You come close to the DNA, the interaction force changes the amplitude. So far so great. Now at this point you make a leap in assumptions. How do you measure movement on the DNA? How it is tethered and which force change do you assume for each base (hint there are several, depending on how you fix the system)? Even if one is heavily diluted you cannot assume that the diluted one will take precisely 1000th the time of the undiluted one. It would be an estimate with an unacceptable failure rate. Bottom line is that you have problems untangling the involved forces AND you will not be able to distinguish between the bases. Regarding dyes, just check Science for an article last year, they actually sequenced a viral genome just based on fluorescence measurement. Why should it be difficult to have each nucleotide differently labelled? They do it routinely for years even for Sanger sequencing (using one channel capillaries). Also you may want to solve the Michaelis-Menten kinetics (probably assuming three dimensional freedom for this issue) to see how much time difference you would actually expect on average for the given reaction (and think whether there is a way to statistically derive the right base from it at all. Finally, take into account that if the wrong bases are vastly overrepresented, it increases the chance of polymerase errors and stalls. In large reaction it is less of an issue as you will have enough polymerases not doing it, but if you let a reaction continue to go one while monitoring (with whatever means) a single molecule you will run into deep trouble.

Again, what force difference do you expect to measure with the AFM? The strongest force is the attachment of the polymerase to the ssDNA. Then what? Where do you expect to see steps and how do they translate to amplitude changes? More importantly, how do you expect to differentiate between bases? Dilutions do not play a factor as at any given time you only measure the interaction of one molecule. Also, why do you think that monitoring the direct polymerization would be any slower? It is the rate limiting step after all. You do not need different cycles but different dyes.

First, Sanger does not cut anything. You measure when the polymerase stalls. There are other approaches out there, including using the AFM, but most without good results. Mind you, they use intact DNA. Measuring an active process with AFM is hardly practical. Also which forces would you think would change by the insertion of different bases from the viewpoint of the polymerase? The actual interactions happens with the second strand, does it not? The polymerase mostly senses the back of the nucleotides. Incidentally this is also one of the problems with sequencing with nanopores. In other words, the elements that you propose (speed of polymerase) are hard to measure and almost impossible with the required accuracy. Monitoring the insertion of nucleotides whether directly or indirectly is much more accurate. You may be interested in a paper in Science a year or so back where they sequenced a viral genome with fluorescence microscopy. Finally the speed is increased dramatically in the next gen systems due to massive parallelization so getting the required coverage is somewhat less of an issue (though assembly still is).

It should not be only about money but you also have to be realistic about getting a job. Interest is good and fine, but if you want an academic career, for instance, you should know that the competition for jobs is extremely fierce. Worse, in fact, than industrial positions. The reason is fairly simple, there is an overabundance of PhDs in academia in comparison to positions, which have pretty much stagnated in the last decades. It is necessary to establish what line of business we are talking about (i.e. science vs. non-science jobs).

Of course there are more. They require quite some even for energy conservation. Once fertilized they have to grow rapidly. The energy has to come from somewhere. Searching for it is quite easy. Just look for oocyte and maybe electron microscopy and pick out the oldest article you can find. Nowadays you hardly see basic cell descriptions in papers anymore as they have become common knowledge. The alternative is to open a nice cell biology or cytology book.

I am not sure what precisely you propose. Both Sanger and pyrosequencing utilize polymerases and identify bases by subsequently adding or leaving the respective base out of the reaction. The detection of these reactions is far more accurate and direct.

Cane sugar is not much better than high fructose corn syrup. It is essentially sucrose, a di-saccharid of glucose and fructose. The bioavailability of the fructose content may be slightly lower as it has to be cleaved and I am not sure how efficient it happens for a given intake. At least rat studies indicated that while sucrose had similar effects, a slightly higher concentration was needed (IIRC). Also the FDA does not give safety limits for normal nutrients (afaik) especially as it can easily be disputed where they are.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2224648/pdf/327.pdf Take a look at the drawing there (fig.1) the bottom is part of the oocyte. You can quite clearly see inclusion bodies including mitchondria there.

Well, I'd like to see them try. I am almost sure that the companies will cry government interference and somehow shoot it down. At the same time they will start commercials with titles like: "Drink soda for freedom".

Hmm good point. Have not thought of that.

Come one, it is the same with everything else. The dosage is the important bit. It is a bit of a no-brainer that a high-fructose diet is not good for you. The problem is that high-fructose corn syrup (at least in the US) is an almost ubiquitous in rather high concentrations. The main issue is most likely sodas, sweets and possibly some of the ready-made food. Finally, fruit juice (depending on fruit and whether it is 100% pure) also contains more fructose per volume as the original fruit (obviously). Drinking too much juice (e.g. as sole source of liquid) is also considered somewhat unhealthy (though probably less so than with sodas).