When I was writing up my PhD thesis I was paranoid about data backup. Years of hard work - pictures, data-files, notes, publication lists not to mention the thesis manuscript itself - all stored on one hard drive. Copying onto CDs or detachable hard drives was fine, but what if I lost those, or they became corrupt?, or what if my house burnt down? - all my work would be gone. Read more »

I just came across an extremely nice piece of plasmid mapping and annotation software that I’d like to share with you. PlasMapper is a web-based application, created by staff from the University of Alberta, that automatically generates fully annotated plasmid maps from your raw sequence input.

Using a database containing the sequences of hundreds of features (replication origins, antibiotic resistance cassettes etc), as well as restriction enzymes, the program identifies each of the features in your inputted plasmid and renders them in a publication quality graphical or text map. The image on the right shows some examples of the output of the application - click the image to view a larger version. Read more »

Podcasts are great. I listen to podcasts every day during my commute and find them a great way to pick up information, whether it’s to learn about a new subject, brush up on something I have studied before or keep up with the news. Here are 10 molecular and cell biology related podcasts that I hope you will find useful. Read more »

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 »

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 »