CharonY

I have not heard from bamboo kun before but from what I read it is supposed to be a bacteriostaticum. That is, it prevents bacterial growth, but does not actively kill. Based on that it is kind of weird that the titer is going down after 24 hours. So according to this result it rally killed bacteria. To get the percentage you need simply to calculate: (surviving bacteria/initial bacteria)*100. The antimicrobial activity is simply another way of easily expressing this ratio. Here the difference of the log10 values before and after treatment is indicated. It is a simplification because the titers are usually so high that it is easier to operate with log values.

Indeed. I recall a documentary about a British Airways flight that went through volcano ash which subsequently killed all engines of the 747. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 Actually the whole appeared to be extremely calm regarding the circumstances. Although, they had the advantage of being British.

mrsemmapeel, could you please remove the attachment from your post? It is unlikely that someone from the journal will notice this, but it really should not be done in an open thread.

For the integration of electrolysis into the car thing I would assume that normal cars would simply be too small for a electrolysis plus compression system. At least none that would generate meaningful amounts.

Actually they are around already. I read an article of a couple of those in northern Europe and Japan. They are not terribly cheap though. One needs to generate the hydrogen, compress it, etc. Another problem is that in case of using electricity to generate hydrogen, one is again dependent on either fossil fuels or nuclear plants to satisfy the energy need. According to one calculation such a station would need roughly 3-57 MW to serve 100-2000 cars per day. Given this data it is likely that there is hesitation to set up a net of such stations as it is not clear whether the system is sustainable or not.

Hmm never used that company before.

In eukaryotes the chromatids consist of a single DNA molecule. So if it is unreplicated it corresponds to the number of chromosomes, but after the S phase the the chromsome consists of two sister-chromatids, so the number of chromsomes remain the same, yet the number of DNA molecule doubles (one for each chromatid). Edit: In prokaryotes one chromosome always consists of a single DNA molecule. Mostly circular, but there are exceptions.

How large is the lamp? If it ain't that big you could really spin-coat a smallish plate with that and still cover it. //edit: apparently my already low writing abilities have been gone to hell completely. Guess sleep is not that much overrated after all.

Well, while that is true one has to add that your PhD will be granted from a specific faculty (or grad school whatever it is properly called here). So you would get a PhD in, say, engineering. However this is less limiting as you may believe because if your research subject fits what is needed, than it does not matter where you came from. Also many companies stress that they do not seek the perfect fit in terms of qualifications, but rather someone that can actually fit into their system. Which makes sense as relatively few PhDs later on really are continuing to be in the lab (for the monkey deal reasons mentioned above. Only the academia does actually pay PhDs with peanuts).

Funny, here almost all biochemistry classes are given by chemists, which means the biology is often skipped or wrong or jumbled . But in any case, I have a couple of former colleagues joining the pharmaceutical industry. They majority of them are in R and D and one is in sales. There is however, no clear cut study course that will secure a position. If you are going into organic chemistry but make your PhD in a drug related field you are as likely (or more likely) to get a job as researcher (or rather group leader) as a biochemist doing the analytical stuff. It depends on what the company is doing (whether they are doing drug research, drug delivery, production of generics and so on). But classically one should have a strong background in analytical chemistry (you can demonstrate this with a proper chemistry, biochemistry or biology background). As a group leader usually (but not always) a PhD is required and then again ideally your work is related to what they are doing (e.g. pharmacokinetics, polymer science or whatever). From what I have heard though, few companies actually are actively recruiting people for the development of completely novel drugs. What is more common is that there is already data on a drug and that they are doing the validation steps. What the group leader would be doing is not to make the whole basic research stuff, but set everything up so that all necessary studies (as defined by the FDA) are fulfilled. Pure (basic) research positions are comparatively rare (they exist, of course but are much rarer). Often they directly buy a basic idea, from academia for instance, and proceed from there. And many companies are not doing drug development at all but rather focus on improvement of drug delivery, for instance.

You won't get mine to do that, that's for sure.

I am not sure whether there are finalized kits for it out there. It is possible that you will have to do order the antibody alone and make up your own system.

My main question would be whether it is really true. I would have expected that the majority of the AB would not reach the bacteria at all and gets secreted directly. But for fast detection of ABs I would probably try to develop an ELISA system. These are fairly easy to use and can be done even small labs.

Uhm you do not need to acquire a P. aeruginosa strain from hospital to have them AB resistant. Basically all are. The reason is likely the high abundance of exporters found in them that throw everything out before it can harm the cell. One should keep onself clear from this bugger if one has a compromised immune system or have specific conditions that may allow infection (e.g. cystic fibrosis).

Moreover telomere length are also a form of cell regulation. As already pointed out, loss of such a regulation can result in cancer. And also to nitpick, not all immortalized cells are from cancer lines. But all cancers cell lines are immortalized.

Well that and the fact that IIRC the metabolisation of crude oil required a dioxygenase at some point, (i.e. the process is aerobic) and also very slow and rather inefficient. As after all this time there are still oil reserves it indicates either that the bacteria able to metabolize them are pretty young (but there is not much evidence for that) or that their metabolization rate is overall lower than the actual production rate. So without further involvement it is likely that the oil pool would slowly increase over time whereas the bacterial activity would only slow down the process. Human activities on the other hand utilize the pools faster than they are regenerate so they are not only accelerating a process, but in fact reversing it.

P. aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen, so be careful. Also I have to add the caveat that if you isolate bacteria from environmental samples you cannot assume GRAS status, as there may be infectious in between them and there is always the chance to increase their titer to dangerous numbers. This is especially true for bacteria isolated from humans, even if it is only the skin. It depends on countries and then even on the respective local biosafety regulations, but often if you cannot state with certainty what you got in your raw sample, you will have to treat everything as potentially infectious (with all safety measures that have to be taken etc.). That being said, there are number of interesting soil bacteria. For example rhizobia (e.g. Sinorhozobium meliloti, Rhizobium legumniosarum, Mesorhizobium loti they induce nitrogen fixing root nodules in their respective legume hosts. A simple class experiment would be infecting the respective legumes with the given bacteria and see their growth increase compared to non-infected plants. Corynebacterium glutamicum an industrially relevant amino acid producer, Synechocystis photosynthetic bacterium. Shewanella oneidensis it is known to dissimilatory reduce about anything. Myxobacteria, e.g. Myxococcus xanthus it forms fruiting bodies and hunts other bacteria. Just to name a few. Make no mistake though, creating a pure sample out of an environmental one is quite a pain in the lower back. Even if you see a nice uniform colony upon microscopic investigation one can find that it is not that pure after all. I remember a grad students whose job was to isolate bacteria with a specific metabolic ability out of anaerobic samples. Took ages until he realized that the co-contaminant was there because it was smaller than the sterile filter he used....

A) Any potentially infectious bacteria are at least BSL2. This includes all S. aureus strains, regardless of resistance. Moreover, if you try to isolate from human samples you can cultivate a host of potentially infectious bacteria. Again, do not do it without proper training. That is, it is well outside the scope of a highschool student. Just trying to amplify something from human skin is well outside of safe and careful. B) The media is non-bacterial matter. And some media are literally dirt. Only sterilized dirt.

What is the weight of one plasmid?

The graphic alone is not sufficient data. At the very least one have to include what was used as a marker. Ideally refer to the publication please. Just to add, what generally is depicted are certain allele distributions or microsatellite studies. While they show the distributions of the markers in question they do not validate a notion like race per se. Also I have to add that K-means clustering essentially groups your data into K groups. You can either estimate K a priori, or by using calculations as indicated in the OP. They means to estimate K are not undebated, though and often depends on the application of the clustering. In this case, for instance it is likely to be sensitive regarding the genetic markers used. Just from the wording I am somewhat sure that it was ripped out of a legitimate study and "race" was subsequently inserted. Maybe search and replace of population with race.

If anything redundancy is a point in favour of evolution. Created things usually tend not to have too many of those. I mean how many times did you shirt lose two buttons whereas there is only one additional spare was to be found. Not to mention the lack of thread, needle, a coffee, a hot meal, a non-time limited research position, a few mills to set up a lab, donuts and fresh air?

What kind of paper is this and what are the main points?

If you are talking about sequencing a genome, nowadays it would take maybe a month. If all runs work perfectly it may cost less than 100k in sequencing kit costs. To generate the sequence with sufficient coverage using a next gen sequencer (e.g. 454) that is. The assembly would take somewhat longer. But everything could be easily done within a year nowadays. But yes, a simple paternity test would generally not reveal any medical information. Of course the same material can used to search for known diesease markers, though, which is only moderately more expensive (if at all).

Uhm guys, you are aware that are biosafety 2 pathogens? Not that something to play around with (without proper training at least). I am not sure what you mean by that? Even a oure (clonal) culture of pathogens is pathogenic (more so actually). Not totally. It has some historic reasons, but even then they were not randomly selected. Main reasons are the easy genetic access to to E. colis and fast growth combined with easy cultivation.

If you really want bioluminescence you would just clone the luc (luciferase) gene. However you would need an in vitro assay to really see that. Probably Ecoli suggestion is easier, as you only need to excitation light of the proper wavelength (around 390 ish nm). a) you would not need the proteins themselves, you would only clone the genes. This is most easily done either by buying a plasmid with the genes already cloned in, or, if you want to clone yourself, you will need everything to do a PCR. b) the whole cloning part is. The GFP or Luciferase assay can be done in vivo as well as in vitro. c) it depends on the vector. Ideally you would have two markers (selection and counterselection) then you only cultivate them twice (once for selecting for vector and insert, once more for the actual test). d) PCR to amplify gene of interest (requires DNA with gene of interest plus suitable primers), cut the vector (or use a TA vector and a polymerase that does T-overhangs) ligate vector and insert, transform cells with it, select for vector, select for insert.