Addgene is a non-profit plasmid repository that stores and distributes plasmids for academic labs. It’s great if you work in an academic lab and they happen to have your plasmid - drop them an order and get your plasmid in the mail. I don’t work in an academic lab, but I still love addgene… here’s why… Read more »

Here is a list of 10 pieces of great molecular biology software for PC users that I hope you will find useful. I am not a regular PC user myself so I have not tested all of these out so if any of these are no good, or if you have any favorites you’d like to add, please let me know or leave a comment. If you are a Mac user, click here for the Mac list. Read more »

I’ve put together this list of 10 pieces of free molecular biology software for Macs. I hope you will find at least some of it useful. If you any of your favorite free programs are not included, please e-mail me and I’ll add them or you can leave a comment with a link. If you are a PC user, click here for the PC list. Read more »

First of all, I should mention that this application is available for Mac users only, so sorry to all you PC users. PDF skim is a software application that allows you to add electronic notes onto PDF files. As the creators of the application say, it’s time to “Stop printing and start skimming”. Since I normally print out scientific articles so that I can make notes on them as I read, this application should result less paper in my office, and the forests should be happier too.

Update: Foxit Reader does the same job on the PC, as I described here.

Problems with expressing your gene? One of the potential stumbling blocks in heterologous gene expression is incompatible codon usage. Every amino acid can be encoded by more than one codon, and for every amino acid each organism has a favorite codon that it tends to use more often than the others. The availability of tRNA in the organism will reflect this codon usage bias. Read more »

Ever get too many hits from your Pubmed searches? Using field tags allows you to generate more specific searches than keywords alone, saving you from trawling through hundreds of irrelevant articles. Read more »