We still have to remember that Hepatitis C is an RNA virus like HIV. RNA is inherently more unstable than DNA and thus undergo mutations at a much higher frequency. Just like the more effective treatments for HIV consist of cocktail mixtures (ie. AZT and ddI) the virus may still mutate into forms in which the inhibiting compounds no longer become effective. We certainly don't need these more resistant viruses being propogated!
Seeing as you're a reader of Slashdot, you must agree that the Internet is an incredibly useful central location for sharing information. The international scientific community will only benefit from this information. Pharmaceuticals can be developed, futher mechanistic principles and models may be developed; it would be a much slower process otherwise. Which would you prefer if someone in your immediate family were affected with this? Would you like a solution now, or later? Besides, the influenza genome is out there too; why not fuss about that? It has a higher mortality rate.
In addition, scientific journal articles are just as accessible on the internet. Some are free to the everyday user, others require subscriptions. If you're out to do evil and happen to be working at an institution which have subscribed for access, we'd be screwed anyway!
But I ask again, what is someone going to do with a string of letters? Just because you can replicate a piece of genetic material (which is only an organic polymer) doesn't mean you have a fully functional organism.
Let's put this into perspective. What amount of explosive chemicals have been used since its development? Would we have trains going through mountains? How much coal and precious metals have been mined for? How often have we watched fireworks ignited to celebrate something? Obviously others have found less than nice ways to use the materials. It's the same with more advanced knowledge, but the bad stuff always gets to the media first and the way they present the material obviously can have a significant affect on society.
They've only sequenced the coronavirus which has been implicated in SARS. What about the paramyxovirus which some labs have also been finding in affected patients? In any case, both of these viruses are RNA based and are highly susceptible to mutagenesis and recombination. If a new, slightly modified virus appears, we could be in for another epidemic. We go through this yearly with influenza.
What is the harm in posting a string of letters online? The entire human genome sequence is already out there. Until someone figures out what all those letters mean, how they work and how they affect humans, I don't think we have too much to worry about.
Besides, are you familiar with what's published in scientific journals? There's a *lot* of information in *all* sorts of fields which people can exploit.
1000 dodos of the same sex isn't going to do a lot for the population in the long run. Even dozens of each sex will cause problems; purebred dogs usually have some sort of genetic disorder because not enough genetic variation in the gene pool has led to bad genes being paired together.
Affymetrix chips are photolithographic oligos and *very* expensive. We've completed some studies with their chips, but we mostly stick with our own custom printed cDNA arrays. Our human microarray has around 10 000 sequences and density isn't a problem. We don't have to pay the license fee because we aren't selling them. Plus, we don't have to use the incredibly expensive Affymetrix machines nor their incredibly expensive data software.
More importantly, only one mixture of RNA/DNA can be analyzed on a single Affy chip. When you're doing comparisons of different biological states, cDNA arrays are handy because two (and they're even thinking about three or four) RNA/DNA samples can be placed on a single chip due to the different fluorescent molecules for each sample type. Affymetrix only uses a single type of fluor.
Actually, we now have the technology and computing power to get a pretty good map of a virus in well under a week.
Understanding how the virus works (infection mechanism, etc.) and what it does to its host is completely another ballpark.
I'm not particularly fond of the tone in which this article was written. I think that it's terrific that such a recent (8 years) technology has taken part in such a big news event as SARS; however, there is a significant lack of information provided about the technology itself.
I am happy to be one of many users of this DNA chip/microarray technology and this article has terribly simplified its uses and the findings thus far. DeRisi is looking at 1000 sequences, but you can easily place 20 000 sequences on a chip. That's a lot of information! Not to mention, a lot of computing power is being put into storing, let alone analysing all the data generated.
So, we're down to needing the help of bioinformaticians to sort through and organize the 'laser microscope'--essentially scanner--output, but as biologists we still have to figure out what the story being told by this number is. If we're looking at the genes of an entire organism we have to sort out what pathways are involved to generate a certain biological state (ie. cancerous vs. normal) and whether it's significant or not. There's so much we don't know and entire thesis projects are devoted to analysing such data.
DeRisi's identification that the SARS virus was 'different' is merely the tip of the iceberg of the microarray technology.
It's not quite the same type of 'biological clock'; this refers to a daily rhythm rather than a life cycle effect. Animals have an innate sense of light and dark cycles which has been well studied, yet not thoroughly understood. By changing the length of light versus dark exposure (ie. 13 hours light to 11 dark versus 12 hours light to 12 hours dark) one may observe changes in the animal behaviour. Through conditioning, I believe you can entirely flip-flop an animal's day (ie. our morning would be their night and vice versa) when kept in a room with no natural light exposure.
Anyhow, for a plant this clock is essentially an indicator for when sunlight is available for it to use some energy to make food for storage and when to turn its systems off for the day. If I recall correctly, it also has something to do with IR radiation detection because plants also have to adjust to different day lengths throughout the year.
There may not be an actual use for this protein for us, but it may give us a better understanding of the mechanism by which it works. A novel mechanism may give us a better understanding of some interactions in our own body, even if the pathways may not be directly related in function.
Why does this all boil down to terrorism?
on
Clothes That Kill
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Is the only way a new biotechnological development can be 'marketed' is through it's use against bioterrorism? It would be nice to see more support of how this works.
How does this affect our own natural microflora? What is the mode of specificity for these 'blades'? Killing off our own bacteria can make us more susceptible all the other pathogens floating around.
And I didn't think that all bacteria had a fatty coating. What about those which have high carbohydrate coatings? I thought the coat was part of the cause of their pathogenicity.
The concept's cool, but I'd like a little more data.
With just herbivores around you'd have a lot of dead dinosaurs after they've eaten all the foliage available. Ecosystems are in a delicate balance between number of prey and predators; numbers increase and decrease in cycles.
A lot of predators kill off their prey; the number of predators decrease (due to lack of food) and the number of prey will naturally increase as well as predators and then it starts all over again.
a lot of people who were "immune" to poison ivy find out later that that has changed.
Poison ivy reactions belong to an interesting class of immunological responses. It usually takes at least one exposure (which is asymptomatic) before your immune system decides to collect up a lot of hypersensitive response cells and then the next exposure makes you a not so happy person.
Actually, your lymphocytes are always turning over. Any antigen you've been exposed to causes them to proliferate and also generate long lasting memory cells which help fight any secondary infection by an identical source. This is why we never get the same flu or cold twice. However, since the flu virus is always mutating, a slight change in form no longer allows your body to recognize it and you are susceptible again and need to go through the process repeatedly.
I'm sorry, but are there people out there who wear their contacts for two weeks straight? The build up of other potential toxins behind the lens itself couldn't possibly be beneficial. Plus, what about additional reactions of the drug being delivered with the build up of those potential toxins. (Toxins are dependent on dose, so these could simply be a high concentration of natural chemicals!)
Even if they meant contacts you could reuse for two weeks (which is standard for disposables) the drugs are still being released in the cleansing solution overnight meaning a higher initial dose of drug in these nanoparticles. Personally, a lot more thought needs to be put into this.
The theory behind producing these fibres seem valid, but is there any evidence that these fibres are able to propogate light rays? My concern is that natural organic fibres do not have a perfectly smooth surface which the silicate solution will adhere to, contrary to synthetically produced fibres. Do imperfections on the inner surface of the tubule affect how light will travel? Or does this not matter?
As a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. degree and one of a minority who actually enjoys teaching I don't think changing the readability of a textbook is news.
Yes, I do believe that a textbook should be an interesting read to help students retain the material, but it's just as important for the teacher to make the information exciting as well.
Students all learn differently and teachers should be assessing students using different and valid techniques to determine if their 'little ones' are understanding what is being taught. If some are having difficulties, it should be up to a good teacher to find another way to connect with the student. The downfall of all this is the limited time a teacher has to cover a certain amount of material.
The field of teaching science to students is under constant review and revision and there are many questions yet to be answered. Entire journals are dedicated to improve the methods used to educate students in various scientific fields.
antibiotics are important to pneumonia
Antibiotics would only be effect against bacterial pneumonia. There are some cases where pneumonia is thought to be caused by viruses.
http://www.lungusa.org/diseases/lungpneumoni.html# viral
I think it is the term 'Designer Baby' is somewhat misleading. It encompasses the selection and implatation of an embryo, with no potentially bad genes from the parents, of a population of them which have been fertilized by IVF.
Although the theory is there, I'm not sure if anyone has successfully 'fixed' bad genes in an embryo.
we'll just encounter the problem of Staph becoming resistant to this compound once other pharmaceutical companies begin to manufacture similar products to try to undercut AquaPharm.
Although the triple helix is not the physiological form of the molecule, triple helices of DNA may still be found in specific situations. This is thought to be a form of gene expression regulation.
http://www.molbio.su.se/restriple.html
I beg to differ. Recall that Wilkins was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Watson and Crick. Unfortunately, Nobel Laureates may not be declared posthumously and Franklin had passed away due to cancer by 1962.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... The conversion is 2.54 cm = 1 inch. We're talking about at a flower which is 107.48 inches or almost 9 feet.
'Breakthrough' may provide a clue as to what the article is referring to.
We still have to remember that Hepatitis C is an RNA virus like HIV. RNA is inherently more unstable than DNA and thus undergo mutations at a much higher frequency. Just like the more effective treatments for HIV consist of cocktail mixtures (ie. AZT and ddI) the virus may still mutate into forms in which the inhibiting compounds no longer become effective. We certainly don't need these more resistant viruses being propogated!
Seeing as you're a reader of Slashdot, you must agree that the Internet is an incredibly useful central location for sharing information. The international scientific community will only benefit from this information. Pharmaceuticals can be developed, futher mechanistic principles and models may be developed; it would be a much slower process otherwise. Which would you prefer if someone in your immediate family were affected with this? Would you like a solution now, or later? Besides, the influenza genome is out there too; why not fuss about that? It has a higher mortality rate.
In addition, scientific journal articles are just as accessible on the internet. Some are free to the everyday user, others require subscriptions. If you're out to do evil and happen to be working at an institution which have subscribed for access, we'd be screwed anyway!
But I ask again, what is someone going to do with a string of letters? Just because you can replicate a piece of genetic material (which is only an organic polymer) doesn't mean you have a fully functional organism.
Let's put this into perspective. What amount of explosive chemicals have been used since its development? Would we have trains going through mountains? How much coal and precious metals have been mined for? How often have we watched fireworks ignited to celebrate something? Obviously others have found less than nice ways to use the materials. It's the same with more advanced knowledge, but the bad stuff always gets to the media first and the way they present the material obviously can have a significant affect on society.
They've only sequenced the coronavirus which has been implicated in SARS. What about the paramyxovirus which some labs have also been finding in affected patients? In any case, both of these viruses are RNA based and are highly susceptible to mutagenesis and recombination. If a new, slightly modified virus appears, we could be in for another epidemic. We go through this yearly with influenza.
What is the harm in posting a string of letters online? The entire human genome sequence is already out there. Until someone figures out what all those letters mean, how they work and how they affect humans, I don't think we have too much to worry about.
Besides, are you familiar with what's published in scientific journals? There's a *lot* of information in *all* sorts of fields which people can exploit.
1000 dodos of the same sex isn't going to do a lot for the population in the long run. Even dozens of each sex will cause problems; purebred dogs usually have some sort of genetic disorder because not enough genetic variation in the gene pool has led to bad genes being paired together.
Affymetrix chips are photolithographic oligos and *very* expensive. We've completed some studies with their chips, but we mostly stick with our own custom printed cDNA arrays. Our human microarray has around 10 000 sequences and density isn't a problem. We don't have to pay the license fee because we aren't selling them. Plus, we don't have to use the incredibly expensive Affymetrix machines nor their incredibly expensive data software.
More importantly, only one mixture of RNA/DNA can be analyzed on a single Affy chip. When you're doing comparisons of different biological states, cDNA arrays are handy because two (and they're even thinking about three or four) RNA/DNA samples can be placed on a single chip due to the different fluorescent molecules for each sample type. Affymetrix only uses a single type of fluor.
Actually, we now have the technology and computing power to get a pretty good map of a virus in well under a week.
Understanding how the virus works (infection mechanism, etc.) and what it does to its host is completely another ballpark.
I'm not particularly fond of the tone in which this article was written. I think that it's terrific that such a recent (8 years) technology has taken part in such a big news event as SARS; however, there is a significant lack of information provided about the technology itself.
I am happy to be one of many users of this DNA chip/microarray technology and this article has terribly simplified its uses and the findings thus far. DeRisi is looking at 1000 sequences, but you can easily place 20 000 sequences on a chip. That's a lot of information! Not to mention, a lot of computing power is being put into storing, let alone analysing all the data generated.
So, we're down to needing the help of bioinformaticians to sort through and organize the 'laser microscope'--essentially scanner--output, but as biologists we still have to figure out what the story being told by this number is. If we're looking at the genes of an entire organism we have to sort out what pathways are involved to generate a certain biological state (ie. cancerous vs. normal) and whether it's significant or not. There's so much we don't know and entire thesis projects are devoted to analysing such data.
DeRisi's identification that the SARS virus was 'different' is merely the tip of the iceberg of the microarray technology.
It's not quite the same type of 'biological clock'; this refers to a daily rhythm rather than a life cycle effect. Animals have an innate sense of light and dark cycles which has been well studied, yet not thoroughly understood. By changing the length of light versus dark exposure (ie. 13 hours light to 11 dark versus 12 hours light to 12 hours dark) one may observe changes in the animal behaviour. Through conditioning, I believe you can entirely flip-flop an animal's day (ie. our morning would be their night and vice versa) when kept in a room with no natural light exposure.
Anyhow, for a plant this clock is essentially an indicator for when sunlight is available for it to use some energy to make food for storage and when to turn its systems off for the day. If I recall correctly, it also has something to do with IR radiation detection because plants also have to adjust to different day lengths throughout the year.
There may not be an actual use for this protein for us, but it may give us a better understanding of the mechanism by which it works. A novel mechanism may give us a better understanding of some interactions in our own body, even if the pathways may not be directly related in function.
Is the only way a new biotechnological development can be 'marketed' is through it's use against bioterrorism? It would be nice to see more support of how this works.
How does this affect our own natural microflora? What is the mode of specificity for these 'blades'? Killing off our own bacteria can make us more susceptible all the other pathogens floating around.
And I didn't think that all bacteria had a fatty coating. What about those which have high carbohydrate coatings? I thought the coat was part of the cause of their pathogenicity.
The concept's cool, but I'd like a little more data.
With just herbivores around you'd have a lot of dead dinosaurs after they've eaten all the foliage available. Ecosystems are in a delicate balance between number of prey and predators; numbers increase and decrease in cycles.
A lot of predators kill off their prey; the number of predators decrease (due to lack of food) and the number of prey will naturally increase as well as predators and then it starts all over again.
a lot of people who were "immune" to poison ivy find out later that that has changed.
Poison ivy reactions belong to an interesting class of immunological responses. It usually takes at least one exposure (which is asymptomatic) before your immune system decides to collect up a lot of hypersensitive response cells and then the next exposure makes you a not so happy person.
Actually, your lymphocytes are always turning over. Any antigen you've been exposed to causes them to proliferate and also generate long lasting memory cells which help fight any secondary infection by an identical source. This is why we never get the same flu or cold twice. However, since the flu virus is always mutating, a slight change in form no longer allows your body to recognize it and you are susceptible again and need to go through the process repeatedly.
I'm sorry, but are there people out there who wear their contacts for two weeks straight? The build up of other potential toxins behind the lens itself couldn't possibly be beneficial. Plus, what about additional reactions of the drug being delivered with the build up of those potential toxins. (Toxins are dependent on dose, so these could simply be a high concentration of natural chemicals!)
Even if they meant contacts you could reuse for two weeks (which is standard for disposables) the drugs are still being released in the cleansing solution overnight meaning a higher initial dose of drug in these nanoparticles. Personally, a lot more thought needs to be put into this.
Your exponents are reversed. nano = 10^-9 micro = 10^-6
The theory behind producing these fibres seem valid, but is there any evidence that these fibres are able to propogate light rays? My concern is that natural organic fibres do not have a perfectly smooth surface which the silicate solution will adhere to, contrary to synthetically produced fibres. Do imperfections on the inner surface of the tubule affect how light will travel? Or does this not matter?
As a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. degree and one of a minority who actually enjoys teaching I don't think changing the readability of a textbook is news.
Yes, I do believe that a textbook should be an interesting read to help students retain the material, but it's just as important for the teacher to make the information exciting as well.
Students all learn differently and teachers should be assessing students using different and valid techniques to determine if their 'little ones' are understanding what is being taught. If some are having difficulties, it should be up to a good teacher to find another way to connect with the student. The downfall of all this is the limited time a teacher has to cover a certain amount of material.
The field of teaching science to students is under constant review and revision and there are many questions yet to be answered. Entire journals are dedicated to improve the methods used to educate students in various scientific fields.
antibiotics are important to pneumonia# viral
Antibiotics would only be effect against bacterial pneumonia. There are some cases where pneumonia is thought to be caused by viruses.
http://www.lungusa.org/diseases/lungpneumoni.html
I think it is the term 'Designer Baby' is somewhat misleading. It encompasses the selection and implatation of an embryo, with no potentially bad genes from the parents, of a population of them which have been fertilized by IVF.
Although the theory is there, I'm not sure if anyone has successfully 'fixed' bad genes in an embryo.
we'll just encounter the problem of Staph becoming resistant to this compound once other pharmaceutical companies begin to manufacture similar products to try to undercut AquaPharm.
Although the triple helix is not the physiological form of the molecule, triple helices of DNA may still be found in specific situations. This is thought to be a form of gene expression regulation.
http://www.molbio.su.se/restriple.html
I beg to differ. Recall that Wilkins was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Watson and Crick. Unfortunately, Nobel Laureates may not be declared posthumously and Franklin had passed away due to cancer by 1962.