CharonY

Guess this thread is going down towards copyright discussions. But I'd like a coffee, too. But as we are already OT: some journals actually have the authors sign over the copyrights to them. A couple of years back it was quite customary only to be allowed to send reprints of your own paper (which kind of now belongs to the journal) that you (as author) have bought beforehand. Good thing that this has changed for most journals (at least those that I have published in).

I had a discussion with an Italian colleague on this and he was pretty sure (and apparently it was also discussed that way in Italian newspapers) that Berlusconi used this as a test run to extend his powers by issuing fast-track decrees. If this decree is upheld one is expect to see more suchalikes in the future. And the sad thing is that everyone knows that he is a crook and yet they elected him...

jorge, yes, I mistranslated the German word. However, check the OP. 10 survivors are indicated there. In his subsequent post he erroneously compared the original numbers E. coli with those of S. aureus.

Generally in these cases the running conditions are not stringent enough (e.g. buffer, too low annealing temp, too many cycles etc.). Or there are DNA contaminations.

Actually you are not as the peer reviewers do not get paid either. The only things that take money are the editorial staff, editing, and publishing itself. Regardless whether it is open access or not, the author has to pay for the publication (the highest cost I had was around 5000$). But in any case, it is unfortunately in their power to restrict dissemination (which is especially frustrating for the author). It is good that many open source journals (which sometimes are pretty expensive to publish in, though) are rising in their impact.

Off-topic: Why is Einstein's name so often misspelled?

Italy went downhill since Berlusconi and his cronies decided to try out politics (according to my Italian colleagues-- weird enough I have more European colleagues here than in Germany, excluding Germans, of course.).

Ack I noticed that I was still ambiguous. The ratio you get is the percentage of survivors. To get the kill rate you will have of course to subtract that value from 100%. I suppose that is what you calculated above but the value should be even higher. That is another reason why often the logs are used. Something like 99.995% suggests a higher accuracy than the test could possibly give. Looking at the log distances gives a better idea.

Nope. I may have phrased it wrongly. Initial bacteria in this case are the bacteria in your untreated control (the amount that live without bamboo kun). (190000) and the survivors are those that still live after treatment (10). So it is 10/190000*100.

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.