RNA sequencing (Wang 2009) is rapidly replacing gene expression microarrays in many labs. mRNA (and other RNA’s) are converted to cDNA that is used as the input to a next-generation sequencing library preparation. RNA-seq allows you to quantify, discover and profile RNAs. In this article, I’ll give a brief review of RNA-seq and introduce the [...]

Career searches and job hunts are painful: answering ads, resumé tweaking, phone calls, interviews, preparation, sweat, tears, fear of rejection, etc. But it’s funny, even after investing all of this effort, the same mistakes are often made by newbies and veterans alike. In this series of articles, we’ll be talking about a variety of ways [...]

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 [...]

Picture the scene: standing at your bench, you look up at the shelf of neatly-labelled bottles of fresh buffers, you see your pipettes arrayed in size order by your right hand, the gleaming expanse of your bench is in front of you, ready for you to perform wonders of science on its routinely-cleansed surface. In [...]

How often have you torn apart the lab looking for the reagent you need right now for some thawing samples?  That reagent which you (possibly) ordered a week ago and which (maybe) came in yesterday?  If your answer isn’t “just once in my entire career,” please read on!  I will outline four steps to setup [...]

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 [...]

Western blots may be great for visualizing protein expression, but they can be a perfect way to waste your precious antibody stocks if you follow the normal protocol. Thankfully, you don’t have to follow the normal protocol any more; here’s how to get great blots with a fraction of the antibody usage. I have tried [...]

It’s pretty likely you’ll have heard of impact factors, either through colleagues talking about them in the lab, or from a journal homepage advertising its latest score. Whilst impact factor is a relatively artificial value, it is something that journal editors, scientists and some funding agencies take seriously. It’s therefore important to understand what it [...]

I have always had it in the back of my mind that I would like to live and work abroad for a year or two. This was augmented in my mind by the mainstream view in scientific research that a stint in a foreign lab is beneficial to a scientist’s career. The benefit of working [...]