CharonY

So can you point out a place on earth that is free from life as we know but is potentially suitable for other life forms?

And sometimes answers can be found upstream.

I think at least hypothesis states that prions may be of retroviral origin. However prions do not necessarily have to have deleterious effects in their original hosts, therefore the reasoning is a bit off.

Huh? I do not follow.

In addition, it is possible that once a given life form (the current) has established itself, it rapidly filled available niches and created conditions unfavorable for new forms of life to establish themselves. There are some physicists (well, one at least) that argue that it is likely there may be more life around that actually is not based on DNA and that we only fail to see it because biologists are too stupid to find non-DNA based life forms. However, there is no evidence for that.

So it is the pink unicorn all over?

Yes, it means that the same antibody binds to it.

The criticism is mostly based on how to calculate the differences. IIRC Lewontin's argument was based on individual loci, whereas others have argued that the inclusion of a sufficient number of different loci can be used as a distinguishing marker. Regarding the second question, it depends a bit on the type of the study. Generally the loci in question are not selected randomly but either are already known to have distinguishing power for the observed population or in some cases the goal of the study might be to find out whether certain loci have distinguishing power.

Moved to speculations.

For young age cancer, maybe. Most cancer forms are prevalent at higher ages, where there would not be a strong selective advantage. Some interesting predictions from the article

There are some people who, for whatever reasons, argue that society has essentially eliminated selective forces for humans. There are a number of counterarguments, of course. In this recent publication evidence for ongoing evolution is shown based on data from a long-term study (the Framingham heart study) that started 1948. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/23/0906199106.abstract

This is not a magnification that you describe but rather a loss of focus.

I think it is more a mechanistic element rather than something that confers any type of selective advantages. Their prevalence is more or less dictated by the fact that they often carry crucial genes for the bacterium in question.

Also I would consider Occams razor here.

The topic is very broad and is being tackled by various disciplines. Heck, even (bio)physicists are doing something in that area. Major areas involved include the broader area of molecular biology with all its adjacent fields. Other areas are of course cell biology, developmental biology and so on. Biotechnology is generally less if at all involved, although techniques are overlapping in those fields. At your stage you probably want to first get a good foundation of cellular and molecular processes as well as techniques involved. Also you should inform yourself on which level (e.g. molecular, cellular, organism) you want to investigate it. And finally at some point (usually before entering a PhD program) you should revisit your dream in terms on what you want to do career-wise in your future.

Essentially the Western blot is a technique to immobilize proteins on a membrane, usually after applying a separation technique. The majority of Western blots utilize antibodies due to their specifiicity for detection as well as quantification. However any other visualization method is in theory applicable. It is a very universal method thus applied in many field of protein analyzes. It has become slightly less popular in cases when MS based methods are available, though. As viruses are in relative low amounts in a body one rarely try to detect the virus or virus proteins directly but by using the fact that usually the hosts will raise antibodies against the virus. The latter is far easier to detect in e.g. blood samples.

No, while the question refers to the DNA molecule, however the sequence is only depending on one of the strands.

Moved to homework.

You are forgetting that the base pairing has no impact on the question. At any given on one strand the choices are A,T,G or C. The pairing only affects the choice of bases for the the opposite strand.

There is no branch like developmental microbiology. You are thinking either bacterial genetics or physiology. Basically it was the believe and hope that you could get bacteria to do whatever you like with genetic manipulations. E.g. nitrogen fixing E. coli. While certain manipulations are clearly feasible the big changes, e.g. allowing a bacterium to take over the role of another in a completely unrelated environment is still out of reach. Venter's attempt at an "artificial" organism is proof of that. The genome was a re-arranged Mycoplasma genome and was re-integrated into a Mycoplasma cell. And this beast is simple.

Nope. Archaea and bacteria are both prokaryotes.

Nope. You still need the correct cellular background. DNA is only half of the equation. What is potentially feasible is to change the 16S rRNA to resemble another species (though of course it would only trick 16s based taxonomy). It is possible that it would not interfere with cellular processes too much. I may be wrong, though.

Borrelia is not that unique. There are a number of different bacteria with linear chromosomes. This includes e.g. Agrobacterium some cyanobacteria, Rhodococcus and I think some Streptomyces. It is true that they are rather rare, though. But check some older papers from those species and you should find something.

There are different systems and also depending on the context both are still used to loosely describe something. However in the cladistic system both are not used.

It is simply called cytotaxis. It is only that Sonneborn defined it. Essentially it refers to the arrangement of new cell structure based on existing ones. It assume the plos authors will have cited him somewhere.