CharonY

The topic is very broad and is being tackled by various disciplines. Heck, even (bio)physicists are doing something in that area. Major areas involved include the broader area of molecular biology with all its adjacent fields. Other areas are of course cell biology, developmental biology and so on. Biotechnology is generally less if at all involved, although techniques are overlapping in those fields. At your stage you probably want to first get a good foundation of cellular and molecular processes as well as techniques involved. Also you should inform yourself on which level (e.g. molecular, cellular, organism) you want to investigate it. And finally at some point (usually before entering a PhD program) you should revisit your dream in terms on what you want to do career-wise in your future.

Essentially the Western blot is a technique to immobilize proteins on a membrane, usually after applying a separation technique. The majority of Western blots utilize antibodies due to their specifiicity for detection as well as quantification. However any other visualization method is in theory applicable. It is a very universal method thus applied in many field of protein analyzes. It has become slightly less popular in cases when MS based methods are available, though. As viruses are in relative low amounts in a body one rarely try to detect the virus or virus proteins directly but by using the fact that usually the hosts will raise antibodies against the virus. The latter is far easier to detect in e.g. blood samples.

No, while the question refers to the DNA molecule, however the sequence is only depending on one of the strands.

Moved to homework.

You are forgetting that the base pairing has no impact on the question. At any given on one strand the choices are A,T,G or C. The pairing only affects the choice of bases for the the opposite strand.

There is no branch like developmental microbiology. You are thinking either bacterial genetics or physiology. Basically it was the believe and hope that you could get bacteria to do whatever you like with genetic manipulations. E.g. nitrogen fixing E. coli. While certain manipulations are clearly feasible the big changes, e.g. allowing a bacterium to take over the role of another in a completely unrelated environment is still out of reach. Venter's attempt at an "artificial" organism is proof of that. The genome was a re-arranged Mycoplasma genome and was re-integrated into a Mycoplasma cell. And this beast is simple.

Nope. Archaea and bacteria are both prokaryotes.

Nope. You still need the correct cellular background. DNA is only half of the equation. What is potentially feasible is to change the 16S rRNA to resemble another species (though of course it would only trick 16s based taxonomy). It is possible that it would not interfere with cellular processes too much. I may be wrong, though.

Borrelia is not that unique. There are a number of different bacteria with linear chromosomes. This includes e.g. Agrobacterium some cyanobacteria, Rhodococcus and I think some Streptomyces. It is true that they are rather rare, though. But check some older papers from those species and you should find something.

There are different systems and also depending on the context both are still used to loosely describe something. However in the cladistic system both are not used.

It is simply called cytotaxis. It is only that Sonneborn defined it. Essentially it refers to the arrangement of new cell structure based on existing ones. It assume the plos authors will have cited him somewhere.

Some journals also actively ask existing reviewers whether they can recommend someone. It is kind of a community service.

Both are useful (i.e. petpide mass fingerprinting and full sized MS). The first is more convenient, however there is always the possibility that somehow your recombinant product got something that it should not have. You would have to check all acquired spectra, although unidentified peaks could also have other sources). Full sized MS (e.g. with a MALDI) can give you at least the average mass of the thing. You would have to use the right matrix, of course.

Actually it is archaea and bacteria (eubacteria has been ditched as a term). The question is actually kind of invalid as the three domains of life classification according to Woese does not include protists (ditched as a taxon) or protozoa. Protists existed in the five kingdom system according to Whittaker consisting of animalia, planta, fungi, protista and monera. Again, it is not really used anymore.

No caffeine and candy? The end of science.

Isn't the OP essentially describing a Hardy-Weinberg situation, only with selective forces that move towards rather than away from equilibrium?

OK, based on that the only question is whether your old proteins still run as they are supposed to. If they do then it is obviously a property of your proteins. IIRC helicases had a different electrophoretic mobility as compared to their size, but I haven't got any calculations at hand. Deviations of up to 5kD from any given markers are, as a whole, not that unusual, though. The important bit is to establish the identity of the protein in question. If you have access to an MS I would try that instead of trying to tweak the condition to have it match the size.

a) what markers do you use b) are they prelabeled? c) are the proteins in question membrane proteins?

Too hot water will increase the amount some of the bitter compounds that you will normally get in your coffee. The effect is that the coffee will taste like crap but it is nothing new that you get into your coffee.

There are statistics out there that split up the proportion of religiosity among scientists from different countries. I will have to see whether I can dig them up again. But off the top of my head the tendency were that a smaller proportion of scientists are religious compared to the average of the population. Among scientists the natural scientist were the least religious. And among those the order was roughly physicists, chemists and biologists in descending order of religiosity. One exceptions was one poll in which biologists and medical sciences were put together . There the biologists + MDs ranked together with chemists, I think (i.e. medical scientists tend to be more religious than biologists). In many areas faith and the actual work does not interfere and hence is not seen as a contradiction. People are very good in compartmentalizing thoughts. Still, I presume that evolutionary biologists still tend to be the most godless bunch of them all.

This is one of the joys of epidemiological research. In the absence of mechnisms they basically find correlations but not causation (despite the fact that some claim they do). The majority of the research I am aware of found no link. In order to evaluate that in more detail one would have to look at the papers in very close detail, at least in order to see e.g. the methodological differences between the study, the composition of the study population, etc. It is important to keep in mind that the goal of epi-studies is not to provide causation but to provide possible links that can then be investigated in detail.

Or more fuel efficient cars in Europe because gasoline is so darn expensive there.

Uh. Litres? No idea. But as they are more stable in dried form I would search for that instead. Sigma for instance sells 500 g of rhodamine for around 130 bucks, fluorescein was around 200, I think.

This cannot be easily answered. You first would have to know the precise toxicity mechanism of theobromine and whether it is applicable at all to hydras, which have a vastly different metabolism as mammals, for instance. Even if you know how it affects hydras predicting dose-response relationships is not an easy task either (just take into account parameters like bioavailabilty, rate of metabolization, bioaccumulation etc). The easiest thing is probably just test it empirically. The solubility is much easier to figure out. According to some random MSDS sheets it appears to have a solubility of around 0.5g/l.

That kit should give a higher yield (in the µg range). It sounds like there is an upstream problem. What cells are those and how much do you use per extraction? One common problem is the efficiency of lysis, for example. Or you just do not have enough starting material.