ECL can be an expensive reagent in a lab, and what with it being involved in the final stage of a western blot, it’s something you don’t want to have to worry about too much. During my PhD, I was struggling with my western blots for ages – it seemed I was doing everything right, [...]

Ethanol is super useful. It’s great for killing bugs, setting things on fire, and forcing nucleic acids out of solution. But not all ethanol is created equal, and not all kinds of ethanol are suitable for every task. To help you make sense of your flammables cabinet, here’s the rundown on the grades of ethanols [...]

A young laboratory technician was puzzled by his plates when he pulled them out of the warm room. They never looked that cloudy and fuzzy before. He brought them to his lab director, who shook her head sadly; together, they threw the plates away. Does this story sound familiar? What probably happened was an all-too [...]

Mycoplasma infections are very, very bad news; these special prokaryotes can rapidly spread through your cell culture and inhibit cell proliferation, induce apoptosis, cytokines and radicals, and otherwise transform your cells. Worst of all, since contamination is not easy to spot, you may not realize your culture is contaminated until it’s too late. The 100 [...]

Is there anything more tedious than pH-ing a solution? Standing there adjusting the pH of your buffer, adding acid or alkali drop by drop until you get to the right pH… With pH-ing being so boring, it’s in our best interests to keep the equipment in good working order so that we needn’t fuss over [...]

Commercial kits for isolation of large quantities of plasmid DNA generally rely on standard alkaline lysis followed by an affinity chromatography column-based method to purify DNA. Compared to traditional cesium chloride banding or PEG precipitation of plasmid DNA they are a breeze, and have the added benefit of avoiding use of toxic or hazardous chemicals [...]

There’s something disconcerting about going to incubate a sensitive and irreplaceable sample in a water bath, only to be confronted by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Unfortunately, water baths are an inviting habitat for all kinds of life, are often shared by many users, and are a perennially unpopular item to clean.  To help [...]

When running a quantitative Western blot, it’s crucial that your sample preparation is consistent.  Incomplete protein extraction from one sample will skew your results when you compare it to the protein content of a sample that was extracted more thoroughly.  And after the protein extraction, it’s important to handle the samples in an identical manner [...]

Working with RNA? What fun! Those little, nearly indestructible RNases are everywhere – on your skin and mucous membranes, in the water and (some of the) enzymes you use, on lab surfaces, even in airborne microbes! Here are 10 ways to keep the RNases at bay, and keep your precious samples safe:

Effective sterilisation techniques are essential for working with isolated cell lines for obvious reasons you don’t want bugs from the environment growing in your nice culture medium, and equally, cultures must be sterilised before disposal. So what are the most common methods of sterilisation, and how do they work? Unsure? Read on… WET HEAT (Autoclaving) [...]