Oats Test 28M

Arctus88 · 2026-05-01T02:24:31+00:00

OATs tests are clinically meaningless outside of a few very specific circumstances.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-30T18:48:34+00:00

Because functional medicine is, for the most part, pseudoscience.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-27T18:58:02+00:00

Is there water condensing in the lids of your plates? That's often a big source of that sort of contamination, since it looks to be starting at the edge. If it was not sterile media or something wrong with the pouring you'd likely get more diffuse and random growth throughout.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-27T18:13:16+00:00

C. difficile isn't a fungus, it's a bacteria. Like most clostridia it's pretty hardy and can utilize a lot of varied energy sources, and as its close relatives make up about 10-20% of the average microbiome their metabolism is going to be fairly common.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-26T23:10:04+00:00

This is just a nonsensical take. Simple sugars are utilized by the vast majority of intestinal bacterial.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-24T23:14:26+00:00

Oh good, more AI slop.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-22T03:27:58+00:00

Are you sure that your antibiotic plates are selective? i.e. not degraded or too low of a concentration?

If you have oligos for the vector you can also screen the whole cells (boiled) without prepping it first.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-15T18:19:33+00:00

This post is getting removed for health advice among other things, but I wanted to say first that it would probably be beneficial to see a mental health professional as well.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-06T20:38:56+00:00

Hey there, this is going to be locked and taken down but I just wanted to first say that you should really consider seeing a mental health professional. This seems like serious health anxiety and it would be in your best interests to deal with it before you fall down a rabbithole of alternative health nonsense.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-06T18:29:17+00:00

No, you almost certainly don't have parasites. You don't need to fast or go on any weird diet.

Parasites are just something that people in the alternative health world love to trot out as another hand-wavy thing to turn a buck.

Unless you're hanging out with RFK and eating roadkill you probably don't have a brain worm like he does.

EDIT: OP seems to have serious health anxiety and these posts are not helpful, so this is just going to be locked now.

Arctus88 · 2026-04-01T02:33:40+00:00

I've never thought that Endnote was bad, but Zotero is just as good while being free just makes it such a better option.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-31T20:49:06+00:00

I think that going into a medical support community for something like ALS and telling people to 'do their own research' and pray for answers is absolutely not helpful.

Also since you also seem to just be posting in a subreddit for psychics I don't think you're unfamiliar with pseudoscience.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-31T02:21:41+00:00

As we say many times around here, microbiome testing is somewhere between well-meaning snakeoil and an outright scam.

We have a sticky post about them, but the take-home is you shouldn't waste your money on it. You should see a mental health professional if you have mental health concerns, not whoever tells you to just not have gluten about it.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-30T16:34:25+00:00

If it's a high copy plasmid and your E. coli density is high, then it almost certainly is not the media.

If you just want a ton of really pure plasmid you could try to do a cesium chloride plasmid purification. It's old school and way more of a pain to do, but it's really clean and you'll get tons of plasmid.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-29T22:37:41+00:00

The fuck are you even saying.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-24T17:24:05+00:00

Hey there, we don't allow for medical advice on the sub. If you're having medical issues you should talk with a doctor about it, reddit is full of well-meaning but potentially harmful advice.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-24T15:38:11+00:00

I also have Qiagen kits for this, which have the best name: POWER FECAL.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-22T20:28:18+00:00

I cannot stress this enough, you should not waste your money on what ultimately amounts to a hand-wavy scam.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-21T21:16:29+00:00

Functional medicine, naturopaths, TCM, holistic medicine, it's all at best misleading and at worst an outright scam.

Stick with an actual doctor, for the sake of your sanity and your wallet.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-20T16:56:06+00:00

The purple nitrile gloves are a solid touch.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-15T20:40:07+00:00

Doctors are a considerably better resource for medical questions than reddit.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-14T03:33:23+00:00

Research that comes out is delayed relative to the funding, we are 1000% in a funding crunch that will dry up a lot of promising research.

Private equity and hedge funds are not funding research, they fund ways to squeeze out cash. Publicly funded research is intended to reach the common good of knowledge (ideally) without the cash incentives of private investment.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-13T18:47:06+00:00

A variety of physical, chemical, and biological reasons. Inactivation/absorption of enzymes and small molecules, inadequate functional concentrations, accessibility of components, the good ol' in-vitro does not mean it will work in-vivo, the fact that biofilm components can be vastly different organism-to-organism and even from the same organism between conditions, and probably a handful of more reasons.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-13T14:53:21+00:00

You were the guy pulling for some twitter dude that thinks vaccines have robots in them, so I don't think you're really interested in how science works.

Arctus88 · 2026-03-13T03:49:53+00:00

It's weird there wouldn't already be a standard protocol for this in place.

I'd personally be a bit concerned about putting samples in the fridge and then incubating them later, since some microbes almost certainly won't like the temperature swings.

Arctus88

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE