CharonY

Heh, that would require a bit more detail on what research or diaganostics is being done, wouldn't it?

Actually I fail to see how that would work. Mind you, I am not as long in the USA (and primarily as researcher and not lecturer) and am only starting to grasp some of the more intricate aspects of the system. However from what I have heard only about 30% of the educational cost per student is covered by the tuition fee (which again brings the point that education in the US is, imo massively overpriced). The rest is subsidized mainly by state funds (IIRC). It is probably true that some courses could simply be cut (and maybe some lecturers could be laid off that way....) but I am not sure whether that savings would really cut the overall overhead costs and thus allowing a reduction of tuition fees.

Off topic, but I can imagine that if you put that kind of question into an exam you would be so much in trouble. Hmm unless maybe it is marked with something like "bonus question". That gives me ideas....

Chill, Ecoli. If I would go asterisk every time such a student crosses my path I would have died from heart attack a while back. It appears to be worse with peeps that want to go to medical school though. I am working in different departments and we often get swamped by students who just want to take some lab courses to enhance their chances to get into med school. As the US system is incredibly focuses on marks and exam results, I have to listen every time to their GPA, how everyone topped their class (wonder how that is possible) and so on. I just mentally skip that and ask them to write a research proposal. That culls over 90% of the candidates.

On the plus side, solder is not addictive. With the possible exception of YT, of course.

A welcome to all the newcomers and what is so great about tonsils?I would rather keep a spare kidney, for instance.

Funny, before he retired Prof. Blume's office was about four doors from mine. Fancy reading something from him again. In any case, I suppose despite the babelfishy translation it should be somewhat clear, or does anyone require a more proper translation? And Kaltwasser just means pre-cooled water. E.g. directly from the fridge (w/o ice).

I second that.

Just wanted to add: MWCO = molecular weight cut-off.

Only a limited number of coding gene regions (and their products) have been identified to date. The current available numbers of genes in humans for instance, is based on estimations, not on actually having identified all of them.

EEeeeek Paul Davies.....

Prokaryotes do not have introns as such. Essentially you have several ORFs one after the other (in some cases even coupled). All under the control of the same promoter. And the resulting mRNA does not get further processed (there are exceptions, but I will ignore them for now).

It depends on the membrane (or rather what kind of channels are present). But a limiting factor is polarity. Glucose is very polar (or hydrophilic), as such it cannot pass a closed lipid membrane despite its relatively small size. Ow and technically glucose can pass through a dialysis tube, because the MWCO is usually fairly large (~3k and up).

Sounds like an excerpt from homework. Moved there.

There are also lead-free solders. Slightly more expensive, though (and you may need a different solder station).

Actually if one would like to be super-precise it ain't that straightforward. For instance, I recall that trypanosomes also transcribe polycistronic mRNA, however they get processed to monocistronic ones before translation. I am pretty sure that there are more exceptions.

No, because it either refers to several ORFs that are being co-transcribed, or (more frequently) to the amount of polypeptides that the final processed mRNA encodes. In effect, the processing step is ignored for this type of classification.

Another (and arguably the more important) reason is fidelity. Just as background: thymine formed by methylation of uracil. But it is also possible to get uracil by deamination of cytosin. So if U is used in DNA and a C converts to U, there is no way to detect this point mutation (as it would not be possible to distinguish between an legitimate and an illegetimate uracil) and repair it. In addition, U is more promiscuous in its bonding with other base pairs as compared to thymine. This is because the additional (hydrophobic) methyl group in thymine inhibits confirmation changes and thus greatly reduces the ability of thymine to interact with other bases as compared to uracil.

Actually in principle this is already possible. If you take a cell from the early stages, it can grow to a whole organism again. Based on this after the first couple of divisions you do not have one potential person, but a dozen of them. Each cell has the potential to grow into a whole person. I call it potential person btw. as conception does not invariably lead to birth. Also, for all intent and purposes the the cells are part of the mother and are not a separate entity (yet), as such imo the mother gets to decide.

I cannot really say which of the compounds I am working was the most hazardous. But on a different note: we got a lab safety update recently and within the memo there was the info that a lab assistant at UCLA died while handling t-butyl lithium. From the report the major burns were on hands and arms and secondary to the body (due to a synthetic sweater and NO labcoat). Overall 40% burns which proved to be fatal.

Sounds like an ethics questions to me. Depending how the thread goes I am inclined to move it into the Bioethics section.

Well technically this is the way it is done for any antibacterial compound. In fact you could add the label "with the exception of resistant strains and species" to all but the the harshest antibacterial compounds.

I would be surprised if that was true. From what I know clinical immunologists without an MD are usually analysts or supervise analysts. The could even supervise a department that does the respective analyzes. However, while they can give recommendations I do not think that they may actually treat patients. I may be wrong, of course but I never heard of anything like it.

The test in question is an (Japanese) industrial standard test, using E. coli and S. aureus. It is of course virtually impossible to create a standardized test that can account for any potentially pathogenic bacteria, so for his purpose it is perfectly reasonable to use a standardized tests.

There is a fast track for academy members (I knew one who had fast-tracked his papers that way). The trick is that you need to secure favorable reviews, but you can choose the reviewers yourself. "Hey Dan, could you just write up that you like the MS?". So, in theory there is a peer-review, only in a way that makes rejections very hard. The good thing is that those papers have something like "Contributed by Member x" on it. Generally it can give young scientists quite a boost if the advisor is an academy member, because the article is published with a rather high profile. Just to add, a while back a student of the above mentioned advisor got his paper into PNAS (using that inside track) and he would not stop bragging about it in front of my PhD students (we had a common brown bag meeting once in a while). So I made a rough calculations and somewhere between 70-90% of all inside track submission get published, whereas the rate for the "normal" way is below 20%. That shut him up and two days later there was a cake with my name on it in the break room. I shared it with the others, just in case it was poisoned.