CharonY

I am not sure whether any of them would carry something like that (and Fisher is basically a distributor). Better guesses are probably ABI (the ambion system), Promega, Invitrogen and Qiagen.

Generally EDTA dissolves OKish at high pH (around 8). I think you may get up to 0.5 M then. At near neutral you would only get a couple of mM into solution (I think around 10, but I may be wrong).

What kind of gels?

Lambda (as well as a number of other phages) are basically using bacterial regulation to determine their own status. It is coupled to the SOS response of the cell (activation of RecA, autoproteolysis of LexA and so on). The reaction is analogous to the induced cleavage of LexA by RecA. CI has a slow self/cleavage that is a stabilized and promoted by the activated RecA. The CI cleavage is far slower, though. This kind of information is easier found in textbooks as in journals as it has found its way into the realm of basic or common knowledge (and hence are rarely cited anymore).

In addition, if we raise antibodies to do the blocking (instead of using an analogon that binds the receptor) chances are high that we create an autoimmune disease. In fact a number of them (including e.g. Grave's disease) are the result of the immune system raising antibodies against a receptor with regulatory functions.

Or another way to illustrate odds. Assume you draw 100 cards from a deck of cards (and put it back and reshuffle after each draw). The chances to get that precise order you end up with is 1/(52^100). Yet you just did it.

Shakespeare?

Only in any insurance system (regardless whether it is healthcare or not) those that do not claim essentially pay for those that do. You do not directly pay yourself. If you did you wouldn't need an insurance in the first place. In a completely unregulated system that would mean that those that need coverage most would get kicked out first (or have huge premiums). I am aware that in the US there is a strong reluctance to pay for anything that seemingly does not only benefit oneself. However every insurance is essentially a pool into which every participant pays into, but only a few actually draw something out. Funny bit is when the government tries to establish something like that it suddenly becomes socialist. If it is a company it is capitalism... Quoted for importance.

Spore are specialized encapsulated cells. Putting a virus into (bacterial) spores or whatever does not begin to make sense. Of course you could add pathogenicity factors into a related but harmless bacterium to create a pathogen (there are some examples around) or even easier, just get a pathogenic one to start with. What I meant is the delivery that allows infection of a significant amount of people. There were a lot reasons why delivery of biological agents is rather inefficient. I do not remember all of them but here just some things off the top of my head. Basically you have to remember that first you need a way that makes people inhale/ingest them in signficant amounts. Bacteria and viruses are not able to penetrate the skin barrier (which a lot of chemical toxins could do). At the same time you need to keep them biologically active, which limits the possibilities somewhat. The anthrax letters, for instance brought a high amount of pathogens directly in contact with potential human hosts, however in the end relatively few ended up infected and even fewer died. Now if you imagine that you want to fill a relevant volume (e.g. a house) with that material, you need to deliver quite a lot it.

Skeptic, you are mixing up a lot of different concepts here and in wrong contexts, too. I won't comment on that further, though as it would be off-topic. Re: weaponization. This is not really about plasmids (some bacterial toxins or virulence factors are plamid encoded, many are not), or any genetic manipulation for that matter. B. anthracis (not anthrax, that is the disease) for instance is not harmless on its own as most strains are naturally carrier of the toxins causing anthrax. The weaponization usually refers to the delivery. Most biological agents are lousy in that regard, that is why they are commonly not considered to be superior to chemical agents (though it may appear to be more frightening). Also it is unlikely that they easily spread without being noticed, as usual symptoms appear first. There are exceptions, of course (like e.g. HIV).

For most it is. The idea behind it, however, is that even virus only has a limited degree of freedom when it comes to building up its capsule. Of course this still leaves a large space of epitopes to explore. And it is quite possible that change in one region allows an otherwise non-feasible change in another. However a blanket statement that mutations will always change everything is not taking in the restriction of these self-assembled structures. In fact this is a problem that now physicists start to probe (as they apparently either ran out or are bored with non-biological samples ).

Better dead than fed.. eh better fed than red. Something like that.

Didn't anyone tell you that it is not the length that counts? While I also substituted certain chapters with published papers, we had the rule that each paper has to be summarized and discussed within the context of the thesis (1-2 pages). In addition to the fact that omics papers tend to be a bit verbose I had something like 130-145 pages.

The reverse. One shape found in all.

If you can just post the formula we can quickly scan over it to see how the relation between the index and diversity is.

Not necessarily. In the simplest sense it just means that life experience can be inherited to the offspring. The offspring itself may modify that according to their own life experience and pass that on. If it wasn't changeable after the first acquisition we would switch to Mendelian inheritance again.

The copyright of the articles belongs to the journal. Sharing them openly is a violation of copyrights. The only exception are open access articles (which, are freely accessible anyway), or in certain cases if you are the author (but not always). In other words, you should not do that. At least not openly.

My apologies, I did not look over the entry careful enough. Just disregard the last comment in my post. First find out what type of molecule we got. Is it DNA or RNA (actually it is kind of a trick question, look in the entries to find it)? The entries in the Genbank file give the position of the feature in question. For example "STS 243..558" says that there is a sequence tagged site at position 243-558 (if you are interested you can look up what STS are). Now I assume that you are interested in finding the coding region. This is termed coding sequence, or CDS. This is all you need to find the nucleotide sequence that corresponds to the AA sequence shown in this entry.

Well, this is kind the point of lamarckian-type of inheritance, isn't it? Not necessarily hormones, but something is passed on from mother to child which is not purely mendelian genetics.

I am not sure what if we mean the same with enriched. What the authors describe is an environment where there are novel objects to explore, social interactions etc. I assume that these kinds of interactions are kind of limited inside the uterus.

A number of epigenetic studies suggest the existence of non-mendelian mode of inheritance. One of the more fascinating findings is the observation that exposure of mice to an enriched environments not only enhances long-term potentiation (a mechanism involved of memory formation), but also enhances LTP in their offspring during early adolescence, even if they do not experience an enriched environment themselves: The Journal of Neuroscience, February 4, 2009, 29(5):1496-1502; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5057-08.2009 Transgenerational Rescue of a Genetic Defect in Long-Term Potentiation and Memory Formation by Juvenile Enrichment Junko A. Arai, Shaomin Li, Dean M. Hartley, and Larry A. Feig

I am pretty surprised that no one came with the mad world conquering scientist yet. My wife tried that for a while, but then funding ran out...

I assumed as much. As I said, it is based on what precisely you want to see with the cell. The simple transmittance is the cheapest, obviously, with the least details. AFM is an atomic force microscope. It is not necessarily the best but usually gives the most details regarding surface properties. The advantage compared to an STM is that it does not require tunneling to visualize matter, which makes it easier for mostly non-conductive biological samples.

Actually this is what you always try to find in a virus (or anything that you want to vaccinate against), a conserved area. If you ask whether it is always the same structure, then the answer is no. Viruses (except very closely related ones) are structurally distinct so that it is unlikely to find a single epitope that is common to all (or even most) viruses.