Timothy McDougald
Posts: 1036
Joined: Dec. 2006
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How to challenge scientific findings and not be thought a quack.
The important part:
| Quote | The research, which was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Agouron Institute, counters previous work of co-author Roger Summons, an EAPS professor of geobiology, who first proposed in 1999 that 2-methylhopanoids could be a biomarker for cyanobacteria. That work was called into question in 2007 when researchers in the lab of co-author Dianne K. Newman, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biology and Geobiology, in collaboration with Alex Sessions at the California Institute of Technology, discovered a type of bacterium that doesn’t produce oxygen but does produce 2-methylhopanoids.
To determine whether this was a chance finding or whether different kinds of bacteria produce 2-methylhopanoids, Summons, Newman, Sessions and several postdoctoral researchers joined forces to figure out which genes and proteins are involved in making the lipids. Knowing this gene, the researchers could then search the genome databases for other bacteria that also produce these molecules. They could also learn more about the purpose of the molecules, such as whether they emerged in response to some sort of environmental stress billions of years ago. |
The research is published in PNAS and sounds like an excellent example of how to test a hypothesis. Unfortunately, I don't have access 
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Church burning ebola boy
FTK: I Didn't answer your questions because it beats the hell out of me.
PaV: I suppose for me to be pried away from what I do to focus long and hard on that particular problem would take, quite honestly, hundreds of thousands of dollars to begin to pique my interest.
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