Recent comments in /f/askscience

iayork t1_j2dhheg wrote

Reply to comment by menooby in Do human antibodies bind to animal cells? I see that in ANA tests they use rat cells. are they transgenic mice? or just regular mice. by menooby

I don’t know about ANA tests in particular, but nuclear proteins in general tend to be highly conserved (I.e. similar across a wide range of species). This makes sense because the basics of DNA replication and RNA production are virtually identical across hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Wikipedia’s article on conserved sequences notes that many of them are the “proteins required for transcription and translation, which are assumed to have been conserved from the last universal common ancestor of all life”.

2

Figueroa_Chill t1_j2dg2f2 wrote

Reply to comment by Doleydoledole in Was there a decrease in other infectious diseases other than Covid due to wearing masks during the past 2 years? by [deleted]

Or could it be that during the Pandemic anyone who was ill just got put down as having Covid, so it disappeared purely by not being classified properly. I live in Scotland and virtually everything was put down as Covid. People started joking that you could go into the hospital with an axe embedded in your head - and it would be Covid.

−2

WayneHudsonIII OP t1_j2dfrf1 wrote

Reply to comment by keithatcpt in I live in New Hampshire, USA. How come it continues to get colder here after the Winter solstice? by WayneHudsonIII

Interesting. Thanks for your response!

So is the thermal lag time just the amount of time it takes to heat things up? So after the solstice, the energy from the sun is increasing but the temperature trails behind? Then at the Summer Solstice even though the energy from the sun starts to decrease, things still get hotter because that lag is catching up?

4

0oSlytho0 t1_j2deu9p wrote

Reply to comment by CrateDane in Do human antibodies bind to animal cells? I see that in ANA tests they use rat cells. are they transgenic mice? or just regular mice. by menooby

Also, antibodies bind "somewhere" on their target. That target may be a specific part of one protein found in humans only, but they could be aspecific or bind a protein part wich's the same in another animal. Bioinformatics can help you for your specific antibody but wet lab testing's the way to go

1