u/Alecxanderjay

Hello biologists of r/biology! I wanted to make this post to discuss r/biology and the direction of the subreddit moving forward.

1. Community Highlights: Currently, this subreddit has 5.5 million members and ~350ish posts a week. I've been doing my best to highlight interesting posts that I think are worth spotlighting by pinning the posts to the top of the subreddit for ~1 week. I'd like the communities response to this, let me know if you like it and ideas for changes that could be implemented. Currently, any post with ~100 upvotes and mostly positive engagement have been getting pinned, however, this could be seen as giving favor to promotional ads for products or certain users so I'm doing my best to be discerning.

2. Rule enforcement: Historically, the moderation team has been fairly lenient with deleting duplicate posts and enforcing quality control, barring auto moderator post deletions for karma requirements, however, I've taken a lot more action in deleting these posts since joining the mod team. I'm hoping that keeping the subreddit more on topic to interesting and engaging discussion will improve the overall quality and experience on the subreddit. This means that a lot of low effort posts are being deleted, with most of these posts being either frequently repeated questions/topics like biology book or youtube channel recommendations or posts related to learning biology that have been asked and answered 100 times over on this subreddit. This week we had 21 user reports on posts and comments with 28 moderator removed posts with most of these being the low effort repeat posts mentioned earlier. Because this is most of what our removed posts are, I'm planning on making a monthly pinned post where users can ask these questions or give recommendations in the comments. A lot of our subs activity comes from users using the reddit mobile website and app, with ~30% of visits coming from desktop users. This means that most people aren't seeing the sidebar where these book and channel recommendations exist. I'm hoping this pinned post will lower the amount of repeat submissions and declutter the subreddit. Again, I'd love community feedback on this idea.

Continuing with reports and rule enforcement, most of the user reports are linked to 2 posts in particular: 1 where a slapfight among users broke out and the op reported everyone who disagreed with them and 1 that was reported as an advertisement that I approved and pinned to highlights since I couldn't find anything suspicious about the users activity. Some posts that could be reported tend to get comments either roasting the OP or directing OP to a different subreddit. Please report posts that break subreddit rules and someone on the mod team will investigate. You can roast OP afterwards but flag the post so someone can take action.

Going forward, I'm hoping the subreddit continues to foster interesting discussions related to biology. Please help your mod team by reporting posts that break the subreddits rules, in particular personal attacks, quality control, and medical questions tend to be the main offenders. Once August starts homework posts are going to increase exponentially so please help us keep this subreddit focused on biology, not homework. Thank you!

Hello labrats!

I'm currently running into an issue with some relatively simple restriction enzyme cloning. I have a gene I'm trying to clone from a plvx-puro backbone into a plvx-neo backbone. The gene is flanked by a Xho1 and bamh1 cut sites and my empty vector contains an mcs containing the same cut sites spaced ~24 bp apart.

The issue I'm running into is that I'm not getting the double digest. My plasmid containing my gene is ~10kb and I'd expect 2 fragments if the digest worked, One at approximately 9 KB and the other 1.2 KB. I did the double digest with neb bamh1-hf and Xho1 in 10x cutsmart for 2 hours. I did a 3ug digest with 20units of both enzymes. My undergrad recently did a set of single digests with bamh1-hf so I have some confirmation that enzyme works but I'm unsure why the Xho1 wouldn't. I added another 20units of Xho1 to the reaction and I'm now digesting overnight just to see if that gets me 2 bands. The plasmid does tend to super coil quite a bit from my personal experience but it is linearized with the BAMH1 cut and I had a very crisp linear band of 10kb compared to my mock digests.

No one in the lab does any cloning so I'm at a bit of a loss on what to do next. I'm also trying to Gibson this plasmid and am optimizing that as well but my bigger concern is why the restriction cloning isn't working as I was hoping I could have my undergrads do some simple cloning projects.

For as long as I can remember, I've heard people joke about "man flu" which is the idea that men react much more dramatically to a cold or flu than women.

Years ago, I also remember reading that there might actually be biological reasons for this, involving differences in immune systems or hormones. But recently I've seen studies arguing that the stereotype isn't really supported.

Can someone explain what the current evidence actually says? Do men and women respond differently to common viral infections, or is this mostly a cultural joke that got mistaken for science? If there are biological differences, why don't they seem to show up consistently in studies?