Cover letters are possibly the most important documents you will write in your career because they can open or close the door to your dream job.

But, surprisingly, people often under-estimate their importance and assume that they are just the lesser companion to the CV/resume.

Of course, that’s not the case. Your cover letter should “cover”, but not regurgitate, your CV in a few paragraphs. It is your marketing pitch for yourself, your first (and often your only) chance to make yourself stand out from the crowd of applicants that have applied for this superb position along with you.

Here are 15 tips on how to write killer cover letters that will help you climb up the career ladder at double speed. Read more »

You know those ridiculously priced and throw-away DNA mini, midi and maxi-prep columns? Well the good news is that you can actually re-use them if you are reasonably careful at regenerating them, with this simple and cheap method described in detail by Nagadenahalli B. Siddappa in Biotechniques in 2007.

Apparently these columns can be reused up to 20 times… perhaps more a guesstimate than a real number, but hey, who’s complaining?

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If you have computers in the lab that you would like to access from home, this might be for you.

LogMeIn.com offers a free remote desktop service that allows you to take control of a remote computer. Perfect if, while relaxing after dinner, you remember that you forgot to turn off the HPLC at work (yes, I did that tonight). Read more »

It’s Friday again, and here are some goodies from around the blogs, focusing on personal development, the science itself, and public aspects of science (the just-post-titles edition):
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Today I was browsing through the “new technologies” section on the Biocompare website. Apart from the amazing but super-expensive automation equipment that most of us unfortunately have little chance of getting our hands on (at least at the moment), five products caught my eye as being useful for improving techniques widely used by researchers. I hope you find some, or all, of them of interest to you… Read more »

All over the world, molecular biologists are tragically wasting hours of their life running DNA gels using tris-based conduction buffers like TBE or TAE.

These buffers are known to overheat at high voltages, causing problems with gel integrity, sample denaturation and more. Because of this, molecular biologists are forced to keep the voltage of their gels to a maximum of 5-10 volts/cm (e.g 100 volts for a 10 cm gel) and extend the running time, sometimes to hours.

Although long gel runs, like long restriction digests, are often used as a convenient coffee break opportunity they can also eat into the molecular biologist’s precious time, leading to longer and less efficient working days.

But, in 2004, a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins came up with solutions (pardon the pun) to this problem. They have developed and verified three conductive buffers that stay cool during electrophoresis, allowing the voltage to be racked up to a massive 35 volts/cm without any problem, reducing the time taken to run gels by up to 7 times. Read more »

Problems with DNA gel extraction can be a real show-stopper since this is such a routinely used procedure. But, even if you are having no particular problems, it’s always nice to try and pick up some information that might improve your technique just that little bit.

Probably for these very reasons, Suzanne’s article 10 Tips for better DNA Gel extraction proved very popular. It seems like many of us are keen to get all the tips we can on this procedure. Well, if it’s tips you are looking for, we are always happy to oblige.

By scouring the recesses of my brain, colleagues and the internet I have squeezed out 5 more tips on DNA gel extraction. Maybe one of them will make the difference for you. Read more »

Here’s the context: “Eighty years after Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin on a moldy culture dish, the battle against killer bugs is faltering. More and more bacteria - including insidious tuberculosis strains that have cropped up² - now shrug off almost all antibiotics. Meanwhile, few new antibiotics are reaching the clinic. Medicine is on the defensive, says microbiologist and physician Stuart Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. ‘We are not keeping up with the bacteria.’” Antibiotic resistance has been a remarkable instance of natural selection in progress.

Now there is something even more remarkable concerning the seemingly endless capacity for microbes to do just about anything biochemically. They can even bacteria that can survive with nothing to eat but antibiotics. It’s not clear why the soil bacteria examined by Geneticist George Church and team appear particularly skilled at converting cytotoxic antibiotics into a carbon source, nor whether this is connected to the development of antibiotic resistance in human-specific pathogens - it’s just plain surprising.
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How to prevent grant funding, musings on career choices and brain doping for scientists. It’s all in this weeks Around the Blogs. Read more »

Following up on my post last week about Emerging Biomedical Technologies and their Promise, Nature had a timely editorial in last week’s issue. In Broken Promises, the article describes precisely the phenomenon that I was referring to:

Intense public support for clinical research can be a mixed blessing — and the hunt for a vaccine against AIDS offers an important lesson for many biomedical initiatives on what can go wrong.

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