CharonY

Not too long, if you really want to have good analyses. If stored it will probably be good for maybe a week, but usually you will note gradual decline in quality. Moreover, you have to store it away from light, if you use EtBr. As agarose gel can be made so quickly it usually does not pay off to make a large stash of it.

Well, there are similar concepts out there. I heard about a service in India, which provides online personal assistance. It consists for the most part of secretary-like work, including things scheduling appointments, ordering gifts for family, finding restaurants and making reservations etc. They are available 24/7 with the limitation of being limited to activities that can be done online or by phone. You may want to look into their marketing strategy and business model. as it may share similarities to yours. Their advantage of course is that they can maintain a relatively low cost.

The chloride (not chlorine!) ions are higher on the outside than in the inside (the fraction that is relevant for the membrane potential that is). GABAergic receptors are a common class. If chloride channels open it counters the depolarization of the membrane (by allowing chloride influx). That is why GABA is usually a inhibitory neurotransmitter.

Yupps.

Take a peel off one-dimensionally is kinda hard, I admit that.

You take 1 ml and fill it up to 10 ml. What amount of dilution is that?

Probably that is part of a puzzle. You know, sort the the posts into the correct sub-forums.

You got it backwards. Microbiology was always about combining functions with bacterial communities instead of collecting more sequences (this is a new thing, starting roughly a decade ago). While it is true that we get a higher resolution of the community, it was always the case that metabolism had precedence. You are thinking in terms of finding bugs akin to going into the woods and trying to find a new rodent/insect whatever. But on that scale the reverse is true. For instance, there is evidence for methanogenesis in rice paddy. So they start looking for bugs that could be responsible. They do not randomly fish sequences and leave it at that. You will note that bacterial species are usually defined by purified isolates rather than the existence of mere sequences. So merely based on 16s sequences roughly zero new bacterial species have been identified.

Just a random thought. We do get homework or simple "how does this work?" questions here and usually people try to be helpful in their answers. However, at times there are helpful, knowledge-based answers mixed with wild guesses. For the one stating the question it may be hard to evaluate which answers are likely to be accurate. Of course one could pitch in and try to correct factual errors but often it will grow to a side discussion. While we do have a rep system, it only evaluates the poster, but not the post itself. I am therefore thinking if it is possible to evaluate individual posts, too. Either free-for all or according to expertise.

Until the health care insurers forget to pay their lobbyists?

Well the time-limiting step is generally not the reading, but the comprehension step. As you mentioned, in field you are familiar with or have gained familiarity you can easily breeze through the literature. Often the papers used a condensed language easily understandable with anyone somewhat proficient on the given field. For a beginner papers therefore take disproportionately longer to read than textbooks, as the latter are more geared towards easy comprehension.

It is laudable that you recognize areas where you lack knowledge in. However, you should keep in mind that the theory of evolution since its start 150 years has been constantly refined and has stood up to the test of time. There is vast amount of information of every conceivable aspects of it. People devote their whole careers in investigating some phenomena of it. Given the body of evidence and literature out there, it is necessary to recognize that if you find something glaringly obvious to be wrong, there is a good chance that you may got something wrong. A discussion forum is only partially useful to clear up such misinformation. Rather, if there is true interest there are very good books out there (for both, informed students as well as laymen) that you may wan to read. Obviously, given the way this topic has been politicized it is sometimes daunting to differentiate between actual scientific sound literature and pure propaganda. The important bit to keep in mind is to backtrack and think what part of the theory you want to address, what does it predict and is there really a contradiction? If you think there is, then thing again whether you understood the basics correctly. This is where most people get wrong. On the first look Darwin's original theory (there are a number of changes in the current iteration, btw.) seem so intuitive often misleading people to wrong extrapolations (most notably social darwinism). But again, the literature has increased dramatically since then.

Given the hold the health industry has I do not believe that too much on regulation will pass either. At least nothing that could curtail the profits of the insurers. Without any deeper knowledge (at some time I was not able to follow this tragedy/comedy any longer) what comes to my mind is SNAFU.

Coffee is god as it is dark as the universe. Believe in caffeine as it spews forth eternal warmth.

Take a look at the genetic code. What mutations may cause a longer protein?

To put it simply, it depends on what signaling pathways the neurotransmitters activate on the postsynaptic cell. This again depends on the type of the receptors to which the transmitters bind. The neurotransmitter themselves have no direct activating or inhibitory activities other than causing conformational changes in the receptor leading to whatever activating or inhibiting signaling cascade the receptor may cause.

Extremely unlikely unless people would suffer from constant diarrhea. In the long go this would kill them off, eventually. Once the person recovers they usually rapidly regain weight.

Wasn't there a rule about not feeding a troll? And why is this thread five pages long?

By normal protein folding mechnisms (it is a quaternary structure).

You seem to be under the assumption (as Davies is) that all biologists are looking for DNA. That is not so. In fact this is just a relatively recent technique. An organism, regarding whether it does possess DNA or not should do something measurable. However, each and every organism we were able to identify does possess DNA. If they are a significant number of alternative lifeforms around, we should be able to see even one single example of it by now. If we assume they are present and even plentiful, but we are just no able to see them, well what is the difference to the invisible unicorn, or Nessy?

Still the same argument. If something is there in a significant amount it should do something noticeable. The current argument is that there should be something that we look for that is not visible to the naked eye nor easily detectable with other optical or microscopical techniques, either does not contribute to metabolic cycling or only does it to an inconspicuous amount, is only present in areas that are hard or impossible for us to reach. The point is not that we did not find a specific species as in your example, but we have no evidence of a single organism like that.

Skeptic, you are proving my point. Their existence had an effect on local cycles. However, I am talking more globally. If something that is totally different in metabolism from any known biological entity exists in any significant amount, it should have a profound impact on biogeochemical cycles. Yet there is no evidence of it. Is it possible that in some remote place a very limited amount of alternative life do exist? Well, I cannot deny that. But if we limit the conditions that much to that we are slowly degrading towards the invisible unicorn argument. Of course there may be something in the ocean. However even from deep-sea studies so far no evidence have been provided. Granted, there were some mysteries, including e.g. anaerobic oxidation of methane. Yet eventually the consortium responsible for it was found.

Also each species is an intermediary one. A wrong interpretation is generally the reason for this kind of question and have been addressed over and over again. I would not be surprised if even wikipedia has a page about it somewhere (talkorigins will have one definitely).

And quite a few are messed up. But it is the thought that counts.

My point precisely. Moontaman, this is the physicist I am talking about. There a lot of counterarguments. Too many to name them all, however even if there was a life-form totally different from us, there should be evidence of their metabolic activity. Yet what happens on earth can readily attributed to existing organism. In other words, even if we do not focus on DNA or even carbon as basis, there is no evidence that are different organisms doing anything. It boils down to plain chemistry. This is one of the cases when someone tries to make assumptions way out of their field of expertise.