Just a bit of fun for a Friday… I’ve often thought that some of what we molecular biologists do with staining and things could easily pass for artwork, but I’ve never seen anything like this fantastic agar plate artwork posted on Wikipedia. It shows a San Diego beach scene drawn on an agar plate using an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins. Read more »

Addgene is a non-profit plasmid repository that stores and distributes plasmids for academic labs. It’s great if you work in an academic lab and they happen to have your plasmid - drop them an order and get your plasmid in the mail. I don’t work in an academic lab, but I still love addgene… here’s why… Read more »

I was becoming a bit bored with the tedium of column-based kits, so when I had to isolate genomic DNA from a range of micro-organisms for a recent project I decided to try something new.

Invitrogen’s ChargeSwitch genomic DNA isolation kit, which uses magnetic beads to separate the gDNA from the cell debris, seemed interesting so I thought I’d give it a go. Read more »

Antibiotics are used in a wide range of techniques in molecular biology. My aim with this post is to provide an easy reference to some of the main antibiotics used in molecular biology, their mechanisms, range and working concentrations. I hope you will find it useful. If I have missed out an antibiotic that you use routinely in your work, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment and and I will add it to the table. Read more »