From time to time on BitesizeBio you will find people writing about books that have influenced how they think about science. It seems only fitting, then, to have a review of the book that launched the idea at the root of all modern biology into the popular consciousness. The first edition of Charles Darwin’s The [...]

Despite obvious differences between the Korean professor-biotechnologist Hwang Woo-suk and German-born postdoc Jan Hendrik Schön, who used to work in the US on semiconductors, both of these scientists have something in common. Since Hwang Woo-suk’s and Schön’s groundbreaking articles were published in Nature and Science, nobody has been able to reproduce their results  and the [...]

Why Metagenomics? The microorganisms that we know and understand today are the ones which either cause human diseases, or are beneficial to human society in some way. From wine and cheese in food industry to the pharmaceutical industry- they are an indispensable part of our lives. Despite making good progress in understanding the microbial world, [...]

In a recent article, I gave some tips about how to obtain good results with sequencing DNA after bisulfite conversion (it contains some tips that apply to the approach described in this article, too). Bisulfite sequencing is a very useful technique if you want to know the methylation status of every CpG in your genomic [...]

In my last article, I explained that plasmid DNA recovered from a plasmid prep consists of few different species; supercoiled, nicked, linear and single stranded circular, and how you can distinguish them on a gel. Supercoiled DNA is the desired form of plasmid DNA; it performs better in downstream applications such as automated sequencing and [...]

In my previous article I covered different immunohistochemical staining techniques at a superficial level. In the following articles I will start to explain these technologies in a bit more detail and in which situations they should be applied. All of the following will involve additional stages when applying them, for example- serum blocking, protein blocking, [...]

For those of you who print out the results that you have acquired from the Flow Cytometer to stick in your lab book, did you know that inkjet printers and cytometers have a shared history? Flow Cytometry is less than 50 years old and machines today still use some of the same principles as the [...]

Comparing and measuring gene expression is certainly an integral part of research—gene expression patterns continue to show us how different cell networks are regulated, and point to new biological pathways and possible treatments for disease. But one crucial part of gene expression lies in making sure that differences in gene expression are due to gene [...]

Alternative splicing is a highly orchestrated process that uses a multitude of regulatory mechanisms. Splicing specificity involves a precise interaction between cis- and trans-acting regulatory elements, and factors that disrupt these interactions can result in aberrant splicing. There are multiple ways in which mutations can affect splicing fidelity: A point mutation in the cis-acting splice [...]

Conserved elements are stretches of DNA sequence that are under purifying selection. That means mutations leading to a change of function in this part of the DNA are detrimental to the organism and will not become fixed in the genome, but rather discarded by natural selection. The level of conservation between species gives an idea [...]