I use them to see Mina's dick.
No, if you had gone to school you would obviously know.
In fact, your house may be harboring more than tens of thousands of pathogen specimens waiting to infect some unlucky, unhygienic human being.
Hell, pathogens can grow anywhere, even under your very own fingernails.
So no it is NOT illegal to culture pathogens. You must be thinking about biological warfare agents.
@Cyberdyne he also might have ment manipulating the genomes of pathogens,which is obviously not true,this rule only applies to humans.
Also how do you plan on changing the genome,to see which one works the best toward combating others or what?
I buy stuff
Read up on bacteriophages. I do not think that I will actually need to manipulate genomes directly, rather have the phages do it themselves.
The phages that I have cultured are called DX phages, and what I have noticed is that they are extremely prone to mutation when transcribing it's viral RNA. As you know, RNA viruses have high mutation rates...so that wasn't surprising. They produce errors during reverse transcription that are embedded into both of the strands of DNA before integration.
Taking advantage of genome transplantation, I am going to experiment with infecting bacteria with synthetic genomes with the DX-phages. High mutation rate = good for evolution! ... at least that's my theory.
Lehsyrus (10-23-2011)
It's very much so legal to do, and to store any specimens I keep mine in a freezer that stays at 243.15 Kelvin. At that temperature all cells in any single or multi-celled organism slows to a point where they age about eight times slower. They still don't last as long but I'm always afraid of contamination.
1-2 weeks for equipment delivery.