If you have ever worked out the price of an electroporation cuvette you will realise that, at several dollars each, they are worth recycling.

Accounts on how amenable electroporation cuvettes are to recycling vary, but I find that as long as you treat them well it is possible to use single cuvette many times.

It’s the metal parts of the cuvette you need to worry about the most - you need to get them clean of DNA and cells and dry again quickly to prevent corrosion.

So the key is to wash and dry as soon as possible after transformation. Read more »

Today’s issue of the Biotechniques journal is well worth a read. The journal celebrates 25 years of existence with a series of retrospective articles covering developments in various fields over the same period.

Among the picks are:

Twenty-five years of quantitative PCR for gene expression analysis

Bacterial genetics: past achievements, present state of the field, and future challenges

Over the rainbow: 25 years of confocal imaging

Mass spectrometry: m/z 1983–2008

Kits and their unique role in molecular biology: a brief retrospective

Remember that access to Biotechniques is free, but registration is required.

Do you remember where you were 25 years ago?

I often wonder why it is that molecular biology researchers stubbornly refuse to change 40 year old methods that, while they work, are not as good as newer, faster and cheaper methods out there.

I suppose rational scientists often have irrational superstitions.

One example of an old method that could be improved is the growth media used for plasmid preparation.

The majority of us, throughout our university careers, have used either SOC, LB or TB, for recombinant plasmid propagation, typically in E. coli. LB or Luria-Bertani broth has been in use for almost 60 years or thereabouts, while SOC has certainly been in use for 2 decades.

But by adding in a few more ingredients or being more economical on others (especially yeast extract and tryptone) that you could get a higher plasmid yield, quicker and with less money. Read more »

Let’s see what’s been going on around the blogs, shall we?
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FEBS Letters is this month carrying out an interesting experiment that could make literature searching easier for both human and computers.

The experiment centres on Structured Digital Abstracts (SDA). SDA are extensions of the normal journal article abstracts that describe the relationship between two biological entities, mentioning the method used to study the relationship. Each sentence is preceded by one or more identifiers pointing to the corresponding database entries that contain the full details of the interaction e.g. protein A interacts with protein B, by method X.

The aim of SDA is to assist data entry, text mining and literature searching by extracting the salient data from the article into simple sentences using a defined structure and controlled vocabularies.

Gianni Cesareni, Editor of FEBS Letters explains:

Many articles in biological journals describe relationships between entities (genes, proteins, etc.) yet this information cannot be efficiently used because of difficulties in retrieving from text. Databases capture this valuable information and organize it in a structured format ready for automatic analysis. The experiment of using SDAs will facilitate database entry and improve disclosure, to the benefit of authors and readers.

This month’s edition FEBS letters contains a number of articles annotated with SDA, along with some articles on SDA itself.

This is a simple but very good idea and I would certainly appreciate anything that makes literature searching easier.

But I can’t help noting the delicious irony in the title of the first article in the issue that trumpets the arrival of SDA: “Finally: The digital, democratic age of scientific abstracts”. Read more »

Leading scientists in a variety of fields gave their recommendations on life changing books at New Scientist yesterday. This makes pretty interesting reading - and certainly throws up some ideas for adding to your bookshelf.

Among the 17 recommended books were volumes as diverse as Animal Rights by Peter Singer, which turned Primatology expert Jane Goodall into a vegetarian overnight, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s life-long companion, Alice in Wonderland and legendary chemist Peter Atkins’ ideal desert island companion, the Handbook of Mathematical Functions.

My life changing book would probably be The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins simply because in a single stroke it helped me de-clutter my thinking on religion. 1984 by George Orwell is also pretty far up there because, reading it as a teenager it turned my perception of human nature and politics on it’s head.

So, as the title asks… what is your life changing book?

Photo: State Of Mind

Here’s a tip that you may find useful if you are expressing proteins in E.coli using a lac promoter-based expression system, e.g. pET, in LB medium (L-broth).

Lac expression systems are typically induced in the lab using IPTG (isopropyl-beta-D-thiogalacto- pyranoside), which is a non- hydrolysable analogue of lactose, the natural inducer of the lac operon.

Tight control of expression from the lac promoter, which is required if the protein being expressed is toxic to the E.coli host or for a variety of other reasons, is not possible when using LB because it contains lactose.

But how does lactose get into LB? Read more »

Do you fear failure every time you do an experiment?
Do you feel constantly stressed about obtaining poor results?
Do you feel personally culpable when an experiment goes wrong?

If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you may be suffering from perfectionism. For a scientist, this is a particularly damaging trait that needs to be recognised and acted on.

What is a perfectionist?

Perfectionists have unrealistic expectations of themselves. They focus on results - often unattainable ones - and are only satisfied if those results are met perfectly. They take no pride in the effort they make to achieve those results, and are highly self-critical if the results are not met.

Pushed towards their goals by the fear of failure rather, than pulled toward them by a healthy desire to achieve, perfectionists are their own worst enemies. But for a perfectionist who happens to work in science, life can be pretty tough. Read more »

It’s Thank Gradschool It’s Friday (TGIF), which means it’s time to peruse the various other blogs out there.
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Well, I don’t have time to write a proper article today, so for your reading pleasure I’d like to point you to a great article posted yesterday on the New Scientist website by Michael Le Page. It covers some misconceptions commonly held by the general public about evolution, and dispells some of the myths that creationists like to use as arguments against it.

For bio scientists this makes an entertaining light read, and is perfect for brushing up your arguments for those after-dinner (or in the pub) debates with your creationist friends. Click here for the article.