Posted on 05/30/2024 6:10:59 PM PDT by Macho MAGA Man
The Beatles went from ‘I want to hold your hand’ to ‘Why don’t we do it in the road?’
Is it happening more often or are we hearing about it more often?
There were many chicken houses destroyed in the tornado that ripped through here last week. I went by some of them two days ago. it was terrible!
Yes, it didn’t sound “free range” to me. Millions of chickens, that’s some range. Imagine the predators flocking there! Worse shrinkage than a Walmart in Detroit.
That is not how PCR works. Having designed and run thousands of PCR assays, I think I have a fairly good understanding of the subject.
A PCR assay is designed to detect a certain length of DNA contained within a specific genome. Even if you run a PCR assay out to 40 cycles, you will not get products of that length. You *might* start to see spurious products caused by the primers annealing to each other, but those products will be very short and will not match the sequence the assay was designed to detect. Furthermore, during PCR development, we take a number of steps to reduce the chance of primers annealing to each other and causing these spurious products.
In addition, when we run PCR, we always run a negative and a positive control. If there is a problem with primer dimers, the negative control will also show a spurious product, along with all of the samples that contain the same primer set. The result we are looking for is a completely blank negative control, a product of the correct size in the positive control, and samples with or without product, meaning they contained the target genome or they didn't.
If the target sequence is not present in the PCR reaction, most reactions will show absolutely nothing no matter how many cycles you run. In practice, we usually run the PCR out for 20-35 cycles, no more. If the target is there, it will show up. If not, it won't.
As for the video you linked alleging that Kary Mullis said that PCR cannot be used as a diagnostic, I found this at the link: This video has been removed for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines. So I surmise that the video did not actually quote Kary Mullis as saying that PCR cannot be used for diagnostic purposes, but twisted something that he actually said into something else. What he really said was that PCR cannot be used to determine the disease burden in HIV patients. That is vastly different than claiming that one of the most common and specific diagnostic tests we have today cannot actually diagnose.
Do you understand that each species of organism has its own unique genome? That it is, in fact, possible to tell the difference between virus species using PCR? PCR is extremely specific. To say that it cannot be used as a diagnostic when it is specific enough to be able to detect variants within a single species is ludicrous.
“Kary Mullis, the guy who invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and got a Nobel Prize for it, said it should NEVER be used as a diagnostic test.”
Source?
Stalking me again, I see.
Please stop stalking me.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4239043/posts?page=93#93
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4239043/posts?page=90#90
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4239043/posts?page=75#75
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/facts/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc0Kysti6Kc
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/facts/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc0Kysti6Kc
https://time.com/6982972/farmers-chickens-bird-flu-iowa-egg-farm/
More than 4 million chickens in Iowa will have to be killed after a case of the highly pathogenic bird flu was detected at a large egg farm, the state announced Tuesday.
“Stalking me again, I see.
Please stop stalking me.”
I don’t stalk.
Proof: https://freerepublic.com/tag/by:epluribusunum/index?tab=comments;brevity=full;options=no-change
Please stop stalking me.
Neither supports your claim.
Pleas stop stalking me.
“Pleas stop stalking me.”
LOL! Replying to a directed post is certainly not stalking!
Please stop stalking me.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/4241181/posts?page=55#55
https://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/4241181/posts?page=53#53
https://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/4241181/posts?page=48#48
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4239043/posts?page=93#93
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4239043/posts?page=90#90
“Please stop stalking me.”
Please stop posing links where I was responding to your posts to me.
Please stop stalking me.
Do you have a point to make with those links?
Remember that I said that I am a PhD educated molecular biologist? Molecular biology is the study of the structure and function of nucleic acids. Having a PhD means that I have learned more about this topic than the majority of people even realize exists.
No one who studies molecular biology is unaware of the invention of PCR by Kary Mullis. When I was in grad school, I attended a lecture given by a friend of Kary Mullis and learned some things about him that are not (and never will be) common knowledge. He was an oddball, to be sure, but the tenaciousness he showed in order to develop PCR is awe-inspiring. PCR is so difficult to master that I used to joke that one could only be successful after making a suitable sacrifice to the PCR gods. (A suitable sacrifice would be something cute like a butterfly or an undergraduate student.)
Nowhere in that video did Kary Mullis say that PCR is unsuitable for diagnosis. What he said was that it is not really helpful for analyzing HIV patients. And he said that using it for detecting retroviruses in HIV patients is pointless, since we all have retroviruses in our DNA (about 8% of our genome is retroviruses). He did NOT say that it is useless as a diagnosis tool.
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