CharonY

I assume all lanes contain His-tag purifications? In the first pic the fifth lane appears to contain something else, whereas the rest could be just different dilutions. Also, a marker would be helpful. In the first gel the many bands may indicate incomplete purification (i.e. contamination with the proteome).

Is the second pic a blot with FAA-specific antibodies?

There are also far simpler experiments for accelerated artificial evolution that can be easily reproduced in class. To reiterate: evolution is the change in allele frequency distribution within a population. A simple lab course involves plating bacterial cultures on more or less selective media. The media represent strong selective forces and by applying them, you weed out all cells and their offspring lacking it. The result is a population that in which this particular trait is fixed (as opposed to the original culture in which only a limited number of cells carried that trait). This can be done with without a mutagenic agent, for example.

Well, for any gene to be expressed you require the cis-regulatory elements. If you leave them out, they won't be transcribed. Viruses could insert inactive sequences (or become inactive later due to mutations), which happned quite frequently in the human genome. However, just not being expressed does not mean that during evolution it may not gain some kind of function. It can, for in stance, modulate the DNA structure and thereby influence expression of other functional genes.

John Cuthber; Separation of Church and State, is NOT and has NEVER been part of the Constitution.

From what I understand Jefferson specified one practical aplication of the first amendment in his letter (and BTW is there any reason to believe that it was NOT from Jefferson?). It is true that the precise wording are not in the constitution, though.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

My link

In fact, there is further evidence that it is not merely intended to prohibit the creation of a state religion:

Modern constitutional conservatives, such as Chief Justice William Rehnquist (in his 1985 dissent to Wallace v. Jaffree), often argue that the First Amendment meant only to prohibit establishing a national church, while permitting government to pursue other engagements with religion. But this position is hard to reconcile with the fact that Congress, in writing the Amendment, specifically rejected narrow language merely forbidding a national church.

 

In June 1789 Congress declined a proposal from James Madison for a constitutional amendment about religion that said, “nor shall any national religion be established.” In September 1789, Congress rejected several additional proposals for a narrow religion amendment. These would have prohibited establishing “one religious sect or society in preference to others,” or “establishing any religious sect or society,” or “establishing any particular denomination of religion in preference to another.”

 

My link

For AlPO4 it was around 9.8*10^-21.

Decades would be extremely optimistic. That is roughly the timeline for (hopefully) getting a working model of a simple cell.

In what way is it not healthy?

Again, it is a matter of concentration. Sugar can be an effective energy source, however overindulgence coupled with insufficient exercise can lead to a number of adverse effects. E.g. links have been established with obesity and type II diabetes. The reason is simply that our metabolism is not adapted to the consumptions level that are now possible.

Yes, but also our metabolism is not evolved to be surrounded by so much of it.

Also, with regards to "but XXX is good for your health": it all boils down to concentration. Soft drinks are generally extremely rich in simple sugars and/or high fructose corn syrup, which is not very healthy.

The nice thing about using liquid N2 is that it is non-toxic

Just want to emphasize Klayno's point. N2 is all but harmless, especially in badly ventilated rooms. There have been a few reported deaths due to asphyxiation. At least two were graduated students prepping samples or filling containers with liquid nitrogen for transport.

I assume it should be noted in a paper somewhere describing those plasmids. However, it is known that sometimes the backbone gets transfected. Judging from the pictures I assume that it was conducted to assess the rate of backbone transfer.

Also, the additional T-DNA could be exploited for the delivery of additional sequences.

Well, both animals very social as such it does not appear extremely unusual to me. For instance, you often see kids closing in on a dog to pet them etc. And depending on the dog, some actually enjoy it. Whether the videos are authentic (i.e. really showing their first encounter or not) is a different matter. Also, if the organg likes to share food (for instance) it is even easier.

Education is considered just another factor in the government's financial picture.

 

I believe that the reason is that politicians need to please the population. The population demand instant satisfaction... (Yes, we blame the politicians and managers to be short term thinkers, but the general public is far worse). And the short term thinking will mean that it is very interesting to reduce the budget of education.

 

Add to that the fact that universities are considered very expensive, and the people working there are "a bunch of nerds that just turn their hobby into a job", and all they do is "look at the stars" which "has no purpose at all", so they are "getting free money for doing nothing" while all the other people are "working to feed those eternal students"...

- That's just some statements that I picked up in the media over the years. People do not understand the value of science.

 

It is a sad situation where universities probably need a marketing department to justify the money they spend.

Interesting enough, either in the report itself or in a comment from one of the authors (I forgot the details), it was mentioned that the desire for instant gratification in students (as well as parents for that matter) is one of the many reasons for the decline of science education.

Carl Sagan wrote something similar in the 90s already.

Also, most universities have a PR department. The outreach programs are at least partially aimed to increase visibility of the university, justify expenses as well as to attract donors.

It has to be said, though that according to polls unis are generally held in high regard within the population.

In 2005 the national academies followed a bipartisan call provide recommendations to ensure economic growth. One of the key findings was that low quality if science education was endangering the US' innovation potential and thus, economic growth. Link

Now, five years later a follow-up report has been published. While some suggestions are at least partially implemented, the once held advantage of the US seems to have continued eroding. Follow up

I have not finished the whole report yet, however many of the key points appear to be very important to me (although I may be biased).Despite the importance AFAIK I can see little coverage of this in the media (as opposed to, say some random remarks of some guy on TV or radio about someone else). Why is that so? Is it because the complexity of the problem cannot be worded into nice sound bites which blame one party or another?

It is pretty well established that there is a material basis for memory. The other terms are less well defined and thus would depend on the context whether data is available. That being said, it is not clear how in detail specific memories are recreated (they are not simply stored and recalled, but exhibit large plasticity). Thus, the available knowledge is limited to which brain areas are involved, to a more limited amount which cellular processes occur, but the detail on how this has to interact with the rest of the brain to recreate a specific memory is still unknown.

I suppose you could have bloody riots if you take away their food and wine. Even surrender monkeys have their limits.

There also a number of patterns that emerge due to recombination with viral sequences, and also the detection of genes with virus specific functions would be revealing.

On the other hand, even endogenous metabolites have more than one effect. Our metabolism is highly interconnected and adding something on one end can lead to weird effects elsewhere. Even just supplementing deficiency can be tricky, e.g. in terms to getting the dose and timing right.

Right your are. My bad.

False premises lead to false conclusions.

Depend on what you mean by "work".

I quite frequently write "no one cares about this" on undergrad reports I mark. Learning what to leave out is quite important.

I keep it more concise. Mostly I just write "so?" extensively in manuscript or thesis drafts....

Just to nitpick, that would be an approximation, not a lie. Other than that, Ophiolite's post applies.

The most robust and universal lysis method is mechanical disruption. But there are literally thousands of protocols for further steps. My main question would be what you are interested in looking at and how. E.g. 2D-PAGE requires something else compared to other chromatographic techniques. Also targeted protein analysis is different from proteome analyses and so on.

Bl21(DE3) is deficient in the Lon protease, thus reducing the chance of the degradation of the product to be overexpressed. Moreover, it carries an IPTG inducible T7 RNA polymerase. I.e. you can control the overexpression by cloning your gene downstream of a T7 promoter.