ivanp84

It depends which protocol is reproduced. You'll probably find the answer in the "Bioconjugate techniques" (2nd ed.) by Greg T. Hermanson. At page 672 (2nd edition) you can see some reaction details. The book at books.google.com: http://books.google.com/books?id=alooWMkRMk0C&pg=PA674&lpg=PA674&dq=SANH+%2B+BSA&source=bl&ots=ixXQ0-Ascb&sig=j6Kr8gUmsAK5J-d42-VLmfK3MJI&hl=sr&ei=Q4GWSojUFMj4_AbCp7DGDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=SANH%20%2B%20BSA&f=false and at Amazon (paperback): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0123705010

There is many ways to stain microbe or tissue. You can use many common chemicals, for example coper sulphate, potassium permanganate, silver nitrate, then organic azo-dyes, indigo, eosin, fluorescein, ... For example, eosin very good binds to Gram positive bacterias and eosinophiles (lymphocytes), and you can buy eosin solution in pharmacy. I can suggest you this link for hobby microscopy: http://www.scuddlebutt3.co.uk/MicroscopyStains.htm You can find many interesting alternative stain methods in old histologies from the beginning of the 20th century. (German histology books at first place) Of course, you can experiment with any dye you can find; for example, you can make baking yeast culture, and then fixate cells on glass and try to dye after that...

You should try BioPuppy linux. It comes on single LiveCD (bootable) and it has collection of bioinformatics programs. Beside molecular visualization programs (RasMol, Garlic, ...), BioPuppy has secondary structure prediction tools and protein-ligand docking tools. BioPuppy site: biopuppy.org For molecular visualization I prefer JMol (has all RasMol capabilities plus much much more). JMol@sourceforge: jmol.sourceforge.net And, not to forget, JMol is Java program, so to run you first must install Java framework from Sun microsystems official site for yours platform (or you can try to find binary package for your gnu linux distribution). To run JMol jar archived try this from console: java -jar JMol.jar The best way for analyzing secondary protein structure is with general purpose statistics software. I use R project for everyday statistics. (www.r-project.org) In R you can perform very subtile multivariate tests (for example MANOVA analysis for significance in protein motifs, etc.) and graphical analysis, also R is programming language with S language superset.

Modern biological warfare is more something like "virus-induced gene silencing" (VIGS), where changed virus induces severe changes in host cell transcriptome. The result can be lost of adaptive immune response, tumors, ... even radical behavior change, like fatal insomnia, madness. In that purpose you can use more common viruse than ebola, marburg or machupo; you'll use more like EBV or RSV, then is harder part to incorporate gene (which encode gene silencer) in theirs dsDNA or ssRNA, respectively. EBV is maybe easier task, but RSV is more virulent... That apocalyptic thing is silent killer... But, as it always is, there is no perfect crime, someone will find that new virus is synthetic, because you cannot change any genome without leaving some ATGC evidence - signature. Because I live in very evil part of Earth, I'm very concerned about chemical/biological warfare topic. Few days ago I read that shqipe terrorist group had biowarfare facility during 1999. war, also they had transfer abducted Serbs to Albanian town of Burrel, where doctors extracted the captives' internal organs. [more info on HRW site: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/15/human-rights-watch-upr-submission-albania]

Bioinformatics can't give you informations which isoform is more active in vivo. Depending on protein type you can make assay for testing biological activity. For example, if you investigating some lectin from some Leguminosae (or Fabaceae) and you find 5 isoforms with isofocusing and you want to find wich isoform is more active at pH = 7.00, then you can make an easy and fast assay with hemoagglutination of rabbit or human erythrocytes. (Make dilutions of erythrocytes in PBS and standard PBS dilution of separated isoforms, and then test each isoform in microtiter plate). That is the way for testing activity, but if you testing affinity, like in Ig case, then you could use pool of, for example, IgGs and a pure antigen for proper IgG. (Ig-Ag precipitation...) None of these standard biochemical methods are "brute force method". Cheers!