by Shoba on March 12, 2010

I recently visited a lab that had a salad spinner on their lab bench and at first I wondered if they were putting together a salad lunch there but when I took a peek I got a nice surprise. It turns out that the salad spinner was (read on...)

by Shoba on September 4, 2009

Hydrolysis probes, commonly also referred to as TaqmanTM is a very popular chemistry for real-time PCR. In this article I will compare hydrolysis probes with PlexorTM. But first, a quick overview of hydrolysis probes. Hydrolysis (read on...)

by Shoba on August 24, 2009

In my last article I introduced you to the Plexor System. And from that we already know that while in reactions that user SYBR Green for detection, fluorescence increases with accumulation of PCR product, with Plexor the (read on...)

by Shoba on August 20, 2009

In real-time PCR, there are two primary ways to detect amplicons using fluorescent monitoring. One is intercalator-based dyes such as SYBR Green, and the other is probe-based techniques (hydrolysis or hybridization probes). All (read on...)

by Shoba on July 20, 2009

When I first heard of touchdown PCR, I thought of a landing aircraft, which, as it turns out is not a bad way to think about it. But despite it's amenability to analogies and dreadful puns (see title), touch-down PCR (TD-PCR), a (read on...)

by Shoba on June 23, 2009

Controls are obviously extremely important when setting up experiments. Without them, meaningful interpretation of the experimental results can be impossible. I say obviously, but in my previous job as a technical services (read on...)

by Shoba on May 28, 2009

I had previously talked about the basics of cell-free protein synthesis and ways to improve yields from the technique. But recently I came across an article describing a technology that promises to dramatically improve the (read on...)

by Shoba on April 21, 2009

In my last article, I introduced Cell-Free Protein Synthesis. Today I want to talk about a major bottleneck in in vitro cell-free protein expression; low yield. Most often, paying attention to the important factors such as (read on...)

by Shoba on March 2, 2009

Cell-free protein synthesis (aka In vitro translation) refers to protein production in vitro using lysates generated that provide the cellular machinery necessary for synthesis. The lysates can be of bacterial or eukaryotic (read on...)

by Shoba on February 16, 2009

qRT-PCR (quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) is now the gold standard technique for mRNA detection and quantification, sensitive enough to enable quantification of RNA from a single cell. The reverse (read on...)