Who wants to know how many cells are in a single colony of Escherichia coli? (3.39). Or the egg size of Drosophila melanogaster? (12.3 nL). Or how about the genomic mutation rate in Arabidopsis thaliana? (0.28 – 0.42 mutations per diploid genome per generation). Who am I kidding? Who wouldn’t want to know those numbers?! [...]

I’ve always liked December, mainly because Christmas and my birthday fall in that month. But this December we are also celebrating moving into the Rolls-Royce of office spaces, at Nine, The BioQuarter in Edinburgh (photo above). This puts us right in the heart of the bioscience community in Edinburgh and turns the Scottish Centre for Regenerative [...]

Transfection of animal cells has proven an invaluable tool in studies of gene expression, cell behavior, cell processes and molecular genetics. Essentially, transient pores are opened within the cell’s lipid bilayer, allowing insertion of nucleic acids (DNA, RNA, siRNA, RNAi), proteins, nanoparticles, and even antibodies into the cellular milieu. Transfection can be achieved using many [...]

I once knew a postdoc who was absurdly accurate at guessing the optical density of microbial cultures. I was jealous – imagine how much time I would save if I could spec my cultures just by looking at them! Since I lacked the innate optical talents required to compete with my friend, I developed a [...]

  On the 15th February 2001 a draft version of the complete human genome was completed. [1] This draft version was far from perfect but was still a major milestone in the biological world.  So, what has come from this?  What have we learned so far and what is yet to come?   Background The [...]

There’s something in the water, and it would love to go after your experiments. Straight out of the tap, water contains microorganisms, endotoxins, DNase and RNase, salts and other impurities that could gobble up your experiment in one bite. Of course we avoid this drama completely by using purified water from which these nasties have [...]

Way back in October 2007, I wrote an article on 10 Firefox add-ons for cell and molecular biologists. I think Firefox is a brilliant browser and it’s open source add-on contributors make it more useful every day. Apparently, Bitesize Bio readers agree because that Firefox article has remained firmly established in our top 10 most [...]

If you’ve ever wondered how molecular biology came to prominence in biomedical research, why so many famous molecular biologists of the past century were trained as physicists, or when bacteriophages were first used as cloning vectors, you may be looking for a good read on the history of molecular biology. Unlike in evolutionary biology, where [...]

Would you like to pretend you are still working while you “Facebook”. These biology-related Facebook applications will help.

Isn’t it a pain digesting, purifying and dephosphorylating your cloning vector prep to eliminate prevent high background in your ligation/transformation? A new generation of positive selection vectors promises to eliminate all of that hassle by killing off any vector that has not taken up the insert you are trying to clone.