CharonY

I think the question is actually: "what is consciousness"? It may very well be an emergent property of how our brain works and does not need to be beneficial per se. Also consciousness is a physical process (as evidenced by by lesion studies). So why the distinction?

RNA is mostly present as single-strand, but it can form secondary structures with itself or other nucleic acids. Thus a certain level of denaturation is required to prevent that. The role for SDS in proteins serves several purposes, actually, of which denaturation is only one.

Great, now you made my eyes bleed.

Well, typical cyanobacteria have doubling times of a few hours...

Also smells like homework.

For simplicity in terms of cultivation I would probably go for cyanobacteria. Some have engineered growth vessels which maximize surface so that the little buggers can get sunlight very efficiently. Nonetheless, the yield for use as biofuels is still very low, even with them. It may depend very strongly on how efficiency is measure, but the conversion efficiency of sunlight to biomass via photosynthesis is closer to 2 (and lower) %, from what I have seen.

1) If you look at database entry you will generally see the complete ORF. Depending on what you need (e.g. if you also want up- and downstream sequences) you may have to switch viewers that provide genomic views and you may need to search a little bit (using the annotated genome sequence). 2) There a hundreds of websites discussing primer design. Much can depend on the type of fragment you want to amplify (e.g. length, extensions, tags etc) as well as the polymerase. But for a general primer on that topic I would just google it (e.g. http://www.premierbiosoft.com/tech_notes/PCR_Primer_Design.html) and see what applies to you.

it is usually a non-issue as the efficiency of the whole cloning experiments tends to be way lower than that of the mismatch rate. You have a slightly higher chance of creating some false products, but depending on how the designers are designed and how the cloning is going to proceed you will end up with the vast majority of the correct product for cloning. Since you have to run controls anyway, the probability of PCR purity being the culprit for failed cloning is very low. There are exceptions however, e.g. if you do some tricky amplifications with very low yields. Salts or impurities themselves are no issue at all as you do a cleanup post-PCR, anyway.

I do not think that this can be easily answered. The strength of the immune responses is determined by a multitude of factors, for example. Likewise normally the respective antibody levels will decline and can fall below detectable levels. Though it does not mean that there are no cells left that present them. In addition, antibody reactions are no necessarily 100% specific, meaning that very weak responses may be triggered with structurally similar compounds. In cases of strong reactions (e..g due to certain infections) especially IgMs can be readily detected after a year or so. More sensitive methods may even spot them longer.

Well, there are labs specialized in monitoring sleep. But with insomnia it is important to understand whether you are truly fully awake or just have a bad quality of sleep, during which you just feel awake. Sleep monitors can assist in figuring that out (or, even better, look for a specialist). There are a lot of guides and help out there to improve sleep hygiene, but it depends a lot on the reasons for the bad quality of sleep/insomnia to begin with. It could be worthwhile to checking those out, though (as following them is certainly not harmful).

One should not mix up these classes, as the impact may be quite differently. Another aspect to consider in addition to the rise of resistances (be it to either class, though far more obvious and prevalent for antibiotics), is the effect of these compounds on bacterial (and other) communities in nature. A higher prevalence of antibacterial compounds may very well disrupt certain processes in water and soil with yet unknown consequences. Finally, neither of these compounds are particularly healthy for non-bacteria, either. Granted, TCS has not shown to have any drastic harmful effects and connections with endocrine disrupting functions are spurious at best right now. Nonetheless, one has to wonder why to put it in in the first place, as it does not have any measurable health advantages.

For PCRs desalting is usually enough.

The OP was talking about a fairly standard method in molecular biology, termed blotting (specifically the fixation step after that). Blotting, in turn is a standard procedure used during Southern hybridization. I appreciate the fact that you would like to join discussions, but throwing wild assumptions around without actually understanding the topic at hand can be amusing for some readers, but especially for newcomers it may be a tad confusing. It certainly is not helpful...

Popcorn, your answer does not even begin to make sense. For the most part I would think that typical ways to immobilize DNA on nylon is blotting under alkaline conditions (the positive charges of the nylon are sufficient to retain the DNA) or cross-link with UV. Vacuum Baking is a bit more old-fashioned way and I am not even sure that the precise nature of the interaction between nylon and the nucleic acid has been well understood (or investigated). It is generally not assumed to be a covalent bond, but something involving salt bridges and hydrophobic interactions (for nitrocellulose that is; Schleicher and Schuell 1992). Which basically means that these are rough guesses.

Ammonium acetate buffers a bit higher than what you need. However, Ammonium formate should be right in your range. The slightly tricky bit is actually what molarity the prootcol demands. Many protocols actually indicates the cation portion. In that case the above approach would be appropriate (just leave ample room to fill up to final volume). Sometimes total molarity is meant, in which case it refers to ammonium formate + formate.. In that case the easiest way is to approximate with the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation (though a little bit of adjustments is often necessary, regardless).

The big issue is that there is really no path per se. There are a number of things people go through (e.g. obtaining degrees and so on) but getting a real career is incredibly hard and very volatile. The best advice is probably to go out and look what kind of jobs are actually there that would interest you and get into contact with these people. This is very tricky, but there is no educational or research path that can land you a specific position. Having a strong network of people is much more useful in the long run. Of course, you are somewhat far off and none of the crucial steps are likely to be happening right now. If you are interested in zoo work, I would try to get an (unpaid) internship there as an undergrad. That way at least you will get to know people. If you want an academic career, be advised that getting a PhD and technical knowledge is the easy part. Just as a point of reference, if you have got a PhD and some postdoc under your belt, you will be competing with about 150-250 other people with at least the same education and knowledge as you for any given faculty position . Even positions on soft money can easily get about 100 applicants. Being the perfect fit that puts you head and should above that competition is often down to luck. For instance you may have just been working on a topic that became hot just when the job was posted, but may have not been hot a few years earlier or later. Having a strong network will help to maximize your chances. That being said, you are still early in this game, and I would advise you to join a lab as early as they would take you to get a feel for the things. Realize though that what you will be doing in the lab will be the stuff you are doing up until and including part of your postdoc (i.e. post PhD but pre-faculty time). but as faculty you will see a radical shift in the things you will have to do. I also would advise you to enjoy your time, where you still got some freedom to do things of your liking.

As pwagen stated, eradication of bacterial diseases are only likely for those bacteria that are dependent on their human host for survival. Those that can also propagate outside can be kept in check with vaccination, but chances are that they will persist. In addition to that, vaccinations are not a 100% protection. They prime your immune system to effectively fight off infections, but as with all biological interactions, they are results are not absolute (though in many cases pretty close). With regards to vaccination of newborns, the immune system of babies are not fully developed. Generally it takes around two months until antibody production is really starting in the newborn and up to six month until higher levels are achieved (up until that point they are heavily dependent on the passive protection offered from the mother e.g. via breastfeeding). Also the protection of vaccinations can decline over time and have to be refreshed. Also it should be noted that stimulating immune responses can be a burden on the body. In adults this is not an issue, but for newborns, who are not really fully developed yet, one has to be a bit careful by how much it should be stimulated in one go.

Based on the available info the answer as well as the reasoning sound reasonable to me. Bonus if you want to do some digging: it is a cytochrome c oxidase subunit. Edit: After re-reading it appears that I may have misunderstood OP. To clarify, the hyrdrophobic run is the part that is located within the membrane. the rest would be intra- or extracellular, respectively.

Yupp, it is worthwhile to highlight things that have solid evidence or are otherwise tangible (time working in a lab, research experience, methods etc.) over pure "personality" stuff. Everyone is writing how engaged they are going to be, how they are going to improve mankind etc. That rarely stands out and/or survives scrutiny. If you are talking abilities, again focus on tangibles. E.g. just stating that you are self-motivated is far less impressive than actually providing evidence of it.

I am not sure what you mean to say. The first part is correct, ribozymes are nucleic acids. But they are not proteins and do not act as protein making factories. If at all, that role could be assigned to ribosome complexes.

Oh dear, sorry to say, but there is quite a bit of misinformation. First regards to gene splicing, in biology splicing refers mostly to RNA maturation. What is being described, most people would refer to as a cloning experiment (e.g. cloning a DNA fragment into another). I am aware that some people do refer to it as gene splicing, but I found that to be very rare in scientific literature (and usually in very specific contexts). As for the rest: Please, the bases are adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine (or uracil). 1) heat first opens up the double strand. To break the DNA sugar backbone you need to do something else. Restriction enzymes are used because they are one of the few techniques that actually allow precise sequence recognition. Using scissors is beyond ridiculous. Ten base pairs mount to roughly 2 nanometers, Good luck in finding those (never mind the impossible task of discerning the bases). 2) editing through light rays? Uh you could try to introduce UV mutations, I guess... 3) Claiming that something is possible does not make it so. Or even likely. Nor even slightly plausible. Also note that uracil merely replaces thymine. For what it is worth...

That is incorrect. A ribozyme is nucleic acid (RNA) with catalytic properties of sorts. A RNAse is essentially an enzyme with the ability to cleave RNA. The majority of which are proteins, but certain ribozymes also have RNAse activities.

The question with regards to the benefits of sexual reproduction is a fairly fundamental one and as such does not easily lead into questions of medical research. That being said, understanding physiology and genetics of other animals greatly benefits our understanding of human physiology and genetics, as the example of the snail genes in Drosophila have shown (and many, many other examples). It is a bit sad if fundamental research is often being slashed in favor of immediate applied research. I always feel that we really should do more to address biological fundamentals instead of aiming straight for cancer cure without properly understanding the underlying cell biology.

Ah the joy of name gene loci. As far as I recall one of the first member of this family was functionally characterized by Nuesslein-Vollhard in Drosophila melanogaster (i.e. fruit fly). I do not know precisely how the name was coined, though one should keep in mind that the naming conventions in those days (around the 80s) were much looser than after the all the genome sequencing projects. I believe it was initially termed sna (though I cannot really tell what the origin of that was). I guess that either it was colloquially called snail (e.g. based on using SNAI as the protein name) and it stuck. A different member of the same family was subsequently named esg (escargot) and a members of a new subfamily were termed slug. So basically they have little to do with actual snails. That being said, they are zinc finger (a special domain involved in DNA binding) proteins that regulate expression of genes that are involved in cell movement. Initially discovered for their role in embryogenesis (which requires significant cell rearrangements). Cancer cells share many similarities of undifferentiated (embryonic) cells and these regulators appear to be involved in this. Anything specific that you are wondering about?

There is not really such job as described in OP. Generally you are allowed to pursue research freely upon reaching tenure but there are major caveats. First, especially medical research requires serious funding. Thus, your research must be attractive for the major funding agencies. In addition, the ability to gain funding is a major point in getting tenure. Thus, what you want to research has to be within the scope of any given funding agency and can not be considered truly free. Note that as in a tenured position you are more heavily involved in managing science, as in running a lab, rather than doing the actual research and experiments (in most institutions). Your job will be mainly split between teaching (huge chunk of time), administrative duties and managing people. In short, as in any job you won't simply get paid to do whatever you want to, there are significant duties that may or may not be in your interest. That being said, you still will have more freedom in terms of research within academia than without. Just note that you will be dependent on funding sources and have adapt your research to it, if you want to be successful.