Recent content by Charion

I would be surprised if Craig Venter was actually involved in that kind of stuff. It is not newsworthy enough. In any case the reversibility of virus inactivation depends on the means of inactivation. Extreme conditions like autoclaving or radiation are usually not reversible, for example (as...

Actually no. It means that they are biological inactive. Dead is rarely used simply because viruses are generally not considered to be living organisms in the first place. This shows the ambiguity regarding whether viruses are actually organisms or merely mobile genetic elements. It should be...

Would it not be easier to simply add a simple tag that can be used to cleave the dimer, once formed?

For proof of principle experiments it may be sufficient to use a mixture easily cultivable non-pathogenous protozoa (or yeast, as you mentioned) for your experiments. That is, if you have some facilities near you that you could use (at least an autoclave and maybe an incubator). As for the...

Depending on the properties according you want to sort them (I did not read the mentioned other thread yet) it may be necessary to actually use the right organisms (possibly even life ones). Problem is that if you do not have the ability to cultivate these organisms, they tend to get rather...

Simply put: there is no such instrument. With fluorescence tagged proteins you can visualize their localization, for instance, but there is no way for direct high resolution imaging of enzymatic activities within a living cell. One could do single molecule interactions with an AFM, but one would...

There are also 100x water immersion objectives. Though it should not make much of a problem for the sample per se. The only factors between oil and water are (besides price) aperture and the requirement for lens correction. If that is not a problem water immersion are so much easier to keep...

Actually that is not quite right. Nitrate can be used as an electron acceptor within the respiration chain (instead of oxygen as we do). Alone it does not create any energy of course. The bacterium still requires to get electrons from an electron donor in the first place. A simple electron donor...

For protists this is plenty. Also, sample preparation for electron microscopes kills your cells. It is purely a visualization technique but does not allow to monitor dynamics or processes. At least not with the given sample. One could capture a series of different samples, of course. The only...

Uh. It is a prerequisite for evolution? What precisely do you mean?

Hmm while partially correct, it is not used in the sense in which the term was coined (depends on what precisely was said though, maybe a bit was misinterpreted). Again: orthology refers to a separation by speciation. This means that it refers to two genes in two different species that derive...

Actually paralogy or orthology do not refer to function and only to a limited amount on the occurrence within or between species, but rather to the mode they were separated. Both concepts, homology and orthology assume a relatedness of the genes, meaning that they are always derived from...

Short answer: yes. Just to maintain cell integrity a certain amount of energy is needed. As such (normally) I would assume that a number of otherwise essential nutrients are not needed, but at the very least a certain basic amount of respiration (be it aerobic or anaerobic) is required for...

Hmm I am not sure what you mean that prokaryotic translation is initiated by specific sequences. Do you mean Shine-Delgarno sequences? To clarify, maybe. The main difference is that prokaryotic genes are often organized in operons, resulting in transcripts that possesses several genes, often...

Anything targeting the bacterial cell wall should do fine. Like e.g. ampicillin.