by Nick on March 27, 2008

For routine procedures involving cell lysis, it's good for the lysis to be... routine. Of course there are many good and freely available lysis buffer recipes but for convenience and reproducibility you can't beat pre-made lysis (read on...)

by Nick on March 3, 2008

Last week, in my article about the perils of exposing DNA to UV light during cloning procedures, I mentioned a couple of stains that offer an alternative to ethidium bromide for DNA visualisation. I this article I compare all of (read on...)

by Nick on January 21, 2008

After years of loyalty, our relationship was becoming stale - things just weren't the way they used to be. I was putting in more than I was getting back and complaining about it didn't seem to help. I just got the same old answer (read on...)

by Suzanne on January 15, 2008

Does your lab have a closet full of white elephants; once expensive instruments that are no longer fit for purpose, or have broken down? In many cases, all of that wasted money and resource could have been saved if the buyers had (read on...)

by Nick on December 5, 2007

Lysis of some microbes is easy, but for others its much more difficult - I think due to differences in the make-up of their cell wall. At the moment, one of my colleagues is preparing hundreds of cell-free extracts from (read on...)

by Nick on November 29, 2007

I just came across a neat device now being offered by BioRad that may interest those of you who do a lot of electroporation of difficult-to-transfect mammalian cells, where tedious optimization of the electroporation protocol (read on...)

by Nick on October 3, 2007

I was becoming a bit bored with the tedium of column-based kits, so when I had to isolate genomic DNA from a range of micro-organisms for a recent project I decided to try something new. Invitrogen's ChargeSwitch genomic DNA (read on...)

by Nick on September 24, 2007

If you do a lot of heterologous protein expression, take a look at Eurogentec's CherryExpress Kit. Based on the T7 expression system, the CherryExpress vector has a sequence encoding a small red polypeptide (the heme binding part (read on...)

by Nick on September 6, 2007

Isn't it a pain digesting, purifying and dephosphorylating your cloning vector prep to eliminate prevent high background in your ligation/transformation? A new generation of positive selection vectors promises to eliminate all (read on...)

by Nick on September 5, 2007

The past few years have seen the emergence of custom gene synthesis as a useful but expensive service available for molecular biologists. Recently, the number of companies offering custom gene synthesis has exploded, pushing (read on...)