by Nick on January 11, 2010

There's something in the water, and it would love to go after your experiments. Straight out of the tap, water contains microorganisms, endotoxins, DNase and RNase, salts and other impurities that could gobble up your experiment (read on...)

by Andrew on September 2, 2009

In part I, I answered the question, "How do proteins in thermophiles survive under high temperatures?" In this part, I'll look look at how nucleic acids survive -thrive, even- in conditions that are too hot for most of us, but (read on...)

by Andrew on July 13, 2009

In response to my last article, �The Taq behind PCR�, one of our readers, Bonnie Barrilleaux, asked whether DNA could naturally survive at temperatures that would denature it. It also begged the question; how do (read on...)

by Nick on May 11, 2009

RPM and RCF are two units that can be used to describe the speed of a centrifuge. Although they may look similar, they are oh-so-different and confusing them has resulted a disastrous end to many an experiment. So let's set it (read on...)

by Suzanne on April 16, 2009

If you want to isolate plasmid DNA, you crack your cells open and carry out a miniprep, trying very hard not to get any contaminating genomic DNA in your sample. If you want genomic DNA, you crack your cells open in a different (read on...)

by Nick on October 28, 2008

Effective sterilisation techniques are essential for working with isolated cell lines for obvious reasons – you don’t want bugs from the environment growing in your nice culture medium, and equally, cultures must be (read on...)

by Nick on September 18, 2008

SDS-PAGE (sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis) is commonly used in the lab for the separation of proteins based on their molecular weight. It's one of those techniques that is commonly used but not (read on...)

by Nick on February 12, 2008

Phenol extraction is a commonly used method for removing proteins from a DNA sample, e.g. to remove proteins from cell lysate during genomic DNA preparation. It's commonly used, but not commonly understood. If you want to know (read on...)

by Nick on November 28, 2007

In the early 1950's so many new enzymes were being discovered in the burgeoning field of biochemistry that enzyme nomenclature was in danger of getting out of hand. With no guidelines on how to name enzymes, researchers simply (read on...)

by Nick on November 7, 2007

Alkaline lysis was first described by Birnboim and Doly in 1979 (Nucleic Acids Res. 7, 1513-1523) and has, with a few modifications, been the preferred method for plasmid DNA extraction from bacteria ever since. The easiest way (read on...)