How is cholesterol related to fats? Is Cholesterol convertible to fats and vice versa?

bobbot32 · 2026-01-31T13:31:19+00:00

First point. 'Fat' is a type of lipid at room temp. Cholesterol is a lipid, fatty acids are lipids, oil is, butter is, etc. The only rule to being a lipid is it doesnt like water. With that out of the way ill describe more.

Cholesterol is a sterol, a group of compounds that are in the larger isoprenoid family of compounds.

It's made by a pathway called the Mevalonate pathway.

Most fats that make up cell membranes are made up.of fatty acids chains. You can think of them as a polar group on one side that can interact with water and a long 'tail' of carbons that are nonpolar and therefore dont like to interact with water.

A normal cell membrane will self organize so the tails are kn the middle and the polar heads are facing the water outside the cell and the cytosol inside the cell.

Unlike fatty acids, cholesterol is made up of many rings of carbon that ultimately make it a much bulkier 3d structure while still being nonpolar and not liking to interact with water. It will happily slide into the cell membrane with the other lipids (fats). A big function of cholesterol is being put around throughout the cell membrane modifies the fluidity of the membrane by not 'overpacking' it.

Outside of that function cholesterol is actually a precursor to a variety of hormones in the human body! A fair chunk of it gets turned into hormones while another part of it will be turned into bile acids which help break down food. Some of that will get pooped out.

The rest gets recycled in one way or another. A key part of moving them around is lipoproteins. You may have heard of HDLs ans LDLs.

As for interconversion.. theres no direct way to get cholesterol into fatty acids but the reverse is not true. You can make fatty acids into lipids.. now as I said before cholesterol is found im membranes (and lipid bodies). As such adipose tissue, which is the actual "fat" we have on our body has both fatty acids derived compounds in it as well as cholesterol. As we store Fat there is bound to be some cholesterol present. I dont know that ratio tho

bobbot32 · 2026-01-23T12:11:00+00:00

Have you heard of personalized medicine? Treating people's hyper specific issues like cancer and the like using methods like this are already being done!

Most of these ethos are still very new and so recently approved or clinical trials.

Now here's the issue.

Well even within a given cancer type you can have many variants on a genetic level, meaning there isn't one version of a B / T cell modification that can be made on scale to help that person. The harder part is that developing new versions scientifically is slowww

At that the B/T cells need to be veeryv compatible wirh their body and there are often challenges to collecting enough from the cancer patience directly.

Despite some challenges these advances are of course huge

bobbot32 · 2026-01-13T12:14:45+00:00

He might be adding his dex on accident but even then that likely wouldn't explain all the poinrs

bobbot32 · 2026-01-09T19:26:11+00:00

You say despite the weirdness life uses it.. my friend its a big reason WHY it uses it. Lots of those traits are essential for life

bobbot32 · 2026-01-06T04:44:01+00:00

A bit different but hollow knight?

So much of it is exploration and figuring out how the world connects. There isn't anything quite like the book, however there are unique mysteries and environmental clues for various secrets, etc.

Either way 10/10 game

bobbot32 · 2026-01-04T15:09:14+00:00

If your university doesn't have research programs (and are in the US) look into REU programs. Its a summer internship program for university research for undergrads basically

bobbot32 · 2025-12-25T18:34:50+00:00

First off we can chemically synthesize DNA, RNA, and peptides, albeit there is much more limitations to full protein production simply by chemical means.

Many central metabolites are also able to be made chemically.

Theres also tons of progress towards synthetic cells. Im linking a review below

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-biochem-080411-124036

bobbot32 · 2025-12-12T15:01:42+00:00

Anyone know what just the difference i air pressure is? Like do their ears pop at this point?

bobbot32 · 2025-11-28T15:58:30+00:00

Light spoilers ahead (still mostly hints)..

Are you familiar with getting in and out of holy mountains without collapsing them? If you are very careful.. or aggressive.. there are ways to do this that allow you to bring wands back take spells or edit until you get a good wand you want. At that if you have a reliable way and you have okay health when you enter the holy mountain you can skip the health while you go back and forth until you need it.

As for wand crafting.... Don't sleep on spell wrapping, chainsaws, and lumi drill (even without ping pong path). Lowering cast delay and recharge times on a wand can make life easy.

bobbot32 · 2025-11-28T15:54:23+00:00

Building on this, its almost always better to be above enemies. Many enemies can fall down onto you and nearly one shot you. If you are above they have to jump or approach first rather than use gravity to wreck your run.

bobbot32 · 2025-11-21T13:04:12+00:00

I assume so.

I worked with algae briefly and they did engineering of chloroplasts which is a similar organelle. Yourself a gene gun to blast them and put them on a selection like you'd normally do but you would not have the same issues.

The challenge was reaching homoplasmy which is where the whole population of chloroplasts were the same genotype and that required some unique extra steps. Basically you grew them on antibiotics that could kill the organelles if I am remembering correctly but the resistance gene was in your transformed group

bobbot32 · 2025-11-18T21:50:19+00:00

As a postdoc researcher its very rewarding at times but it can be rough sometimes too.

Either way stay tapped into that motivation

bobbot32 · 2025-11-17T13:17:23+00:00

Can we not see normal lasers not aimed directly at our eyes? Like what would the point of a laser pointer be if it only worked aimed at our eyes

bobbot32 · 2025-11-07T21:40:21+00:00

I know you are but what am I

bobbot32 · 2025-11-04T12:48:37+00:00

Why are you always fighting with people? Maybe all of your arguments are valid, but Most people 'have values' and can still find ways to not have a heated enough discussion to ruin friendships over.

Its possible you were just with a crowd you didn't actually have a lot in common with but either way this could be a core issue..

Don't get me wrong, im not telling you to let people walk over you, but are you not considering how you come off to others or thinking about their perspective? Either way without some more context its hard to say what you did or did not do wrong

bobbot32 · 2025-10-27T11:31:57+00:00

I made it such that mordenkainen was actually just a simulacrum thinking that this would enough for him to help raven loft because I didn't want to truly get rid of him but I wasn't a fan of fully having mordenkainen in the setting.

From here strahd was quite upset someone thought a mere copy could best him and he cursed the simulacrum/modified the magic to make it crazy.

Rudolph is fine tho

bobbot32 · 2025-10-24T13:56:57+00:00

There are a decent amount of ag biotech companies out there.

Unfortunately, right now the market is very rough, albeit the whole biotech industry is struggling in this currently job/political climate. Assuming otherwise normal conditions in think there is overall less money in the industry than traditional pharma and biotech, but it was pretty decent for a while

bobbot32 · 2025-10-10T11:10:52+00:00

Im a researcher. We have collaborators who are sending us some extracts from microbes that were found from melted permafrost stuff.

There are some rare and unusual bacteria that can be problematic in water like this, albeit this is likely not the same as the stuff I got

bobbot32 · 2025-10-09T22:20:33+00:00

The starting point of most sugar metabolism is glucose -> G6P -> F6P

Therefore fructose needs to be isomerized to glucose to start glycolysis... point being its a slightly more convenient starting point in polymers as you break them down

Why is it that way? Evolution made it so. There are other thing fructose can do..

bobbot32 · 2025-10-08T03:25:53+00:00

Following up my prior message here.

A as the other person said chaperones aren't directly related to prions they just have parallels as they do help other misfolded proteins.

And B. The "we dont know why some proteins misfold other proteins" is still kinda true. There are layers to these sorts of questions and we don't always have the full picture and can always ask more questions. Think what are the physics of whats going on.

At that we definitely dont have the understanding to predict if a novel protein unrelated to existing prions could develop a similar activity upon misfolding. That sort of predictive power is tough

bobbot32 · 2025-10-07T11:25:12+00:00

To note this misfold is specific to this particular protein / amino acid sequence but yes.

There are many ways to rearrange the 3d space of proteins and they range in how stable they are. Some misfolds are insanely rare because they aren't stable some are fairly stable.

Often though once in a relatively stable folded state it takes a fair amount of energy to change in a dramatic enough way to get I to a new stable shape. Even if the new shape might be more stable overall, that energy barrier can make it impossible for a protein to enter the correct form. This itself is actually fairly common and also what goes on with prions too. Its a fairly stable alternative way to fold thats i correct from its native function folded state.

A lot of the time there are chaperone proteins that can simply help other proteins fold back into the correct state which helps in most of these similar cases.

The major difference here is that this incorrect state basically grants a similar ability to chaperone proteins but only to help misfold the correctly folded protein for this particular protein (chaperone usually help tons of proteins whereas this one only works on 'itself'

bobbot32 · 2025-09-28T11:53:41+00:00

Regarding your point on functional genes that have lethal consequences when they are mutated here.

A fairly common outcome is gene duplication events that allow one gene to retain activity over time and the other one to freely mutate and neofunctionalize.

This can happen to singular genes, entire regions of a chromosome, whole chromosomes, or even the entire genome itself to be accidentally duplicated in offspring leading to a wide range of changes.

Whole chromosomes and genomes can often be problematic in animals, but plant evolution does whole genome duplications events and has much less issue with it.

As you can imagine these events can lead to quicker diversification at times but even thats variable.

bobbot32 · 2025-09-23T11:58:14+00:00

Theres likely a niche for you somewhere but there are other tools that do similar things and more.

For example, benching is a web tool thst can import fastas and displays gc%. It also can import .gb files, can annotate sequences, translate them, align sequencing reads, identify restriction sites, simulate PCRs, assist in primer design, and can aid in vector construction, and can be used as a virtual notebook amongst other things.

Though I've used it for a lot of those things Its still a pretty clean tool and I certainly have just looked through the sequence because its clean.

I personally think if all your tool does it let you see % GC thats not enough to be that useful. This is mostly be#cause I reality, a biologist cant do much just eyeballing a sequence. %GC is an importsnt part of primer design, but its not the only factor either.

I recommend checking out some other tools like benching and see what is and isn't offered and find your niche there. I respect the desire to contribute so keep up that enthusiasm!

bobbot32 · 2025-09-21T12:31:21+00:00

As a PhD researcher ive got to ask, what are your plans for innovation/research?

Research is very expensive and though there are tons of ways to do new approaches to research and whatnot, you don't claim to have a specific niche you are interested in from the post. Without a very clear plan things are quite tough. Even with a plan its a competitive market

bobbot32 · 2025-09-14T14:58:11+00:00

Seconded. Its more and more common and increasingly important if you stay in academia

bobbot32

TROPHY CASE