What does a stacking gel do? This and other questions about SDS-PAGE answered!
One of the critical skills required for any scientist is the ability to consistently design and carry out successful experiments. There are of course many variables that can cause an experiment to fail, but there are some basic steps that, if taken routinely, can increase your chances of success every time. After many failed, and [...]
Routine PCR? Let’s be honest, there’s no such thing. Even with the simplest PCR reaction things can go wrong, so you need to have a good checklist of ideas for troubleshooting and rectifying the problem. Today I have brainstormed all of the ways I can think of to approach problems with standard PCR reactions. I’ve [...]
Time for a bit of fun. Here are my top 10 worst lab smells, in reverse order. Please share your worst smells in the discussion! 10. I’ll start off gently with Latex Gloves. Not truly a offensive smell, just a little off-putting 9. Ever stewed a turnip for far too long? No. If you did, [...]
Site-directed mutagenesis studies can be extremely useful for elucidating the function of a gene or protein, or for creating variants of an enzyme with new and improved functions. There are now many approaches available for generating site-directed mutants, whatever your purpose. In this post I’ll summarize three techniques that will enable you to produce a [...]
Sepharose beads are porous, which gives them a high surface area for interaction with proteins and allows them to hold a lot of liquid. This is perfect for the application that they were originally designed for: purifying milligrams of protein in columns. When immunoprecipitation (IP) – a small-scale technique for pulling specific proteins out of solution using [...]
Over 12 years ago, PhD Comics published the first description of PQS (Post-Quals Slump), a highly prevalent condition among grad students that severely impacts their interest in science, and their ability to defend their thesis. As PhD Comics described, this condition can only be treated by a hard-hitting cocktail of Advisor-Pressure (AP), Spousal-Income-Frustration (SIF) and [...]
Last week, in my article about the perils of exposing DNA to UV light during cloning procedures, I mentioned a couple of stains that offer an alternative to ethidium bromide for DNA visualisation. I this article I compare all of the available DNA stains (I know of) that can be used in electrophoresis to clarify [...]
You know the old adage; it’s not what you say, but how you say it. This does not apply to interviews! What you say is extremely important; every word choice and every sentence choice can have an impact on whether or not you are selected for a job. We get feedback about why people are passed over for [...]
While there are many more methods to choose from for cleaning up your RNA or DNA than there used to be, sometimes Phenol/Chloroform extraction is still the best way to go. Here I’ll discuss some of the practical aspects of using this technique. Nick introduced the topic of Phenol/Chloroform extraction in a previous article, touching [...]
