by Nick on February 26, 2008

This is a story that could strike fear into your heart if you use UV light to visualize DNA that you later intend to clone. Read on if you dare. A while back I was doing a project where I had to make a mutation library of a (read on...)

by Nick on February 20, 2008

Whether you need to get your plasmid DNA to a lab on the other side of the world, or a few hundred miles down the road, it's important to make sure your precious sample gets there, it is not degraded, and you don't end up in (read on...)

by Dan on February 19, 2008

With the recent development of transparent Zebrafish, allowing scientists to directly view its internal organs, and observe processes like tumor metastasis and blood production after bone-marrow transplant, it seems appropriate (read on...)

by Nick on February 18, 2008

Since I wrote about the wonders of ligation independent cloning a while back, several people have contacted me to say they were confused about how to design primers for this application. It can be a bit confusing, so here I'll (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 February 1, 2008

If you work at the bench, accurate pipetting is crucial -- without accurate it your experiments would be non-reproducible, stock solutions inaccurate and assays would have such large errors that comparing them would be (read on...)

by Max on January 30, 2008

In the old days, restriction digests were a great excuse for long lunch breaks. Come back 1-2 hours later and it's done. But, just to ruin our fun, Fermentas then NEB started to offer ranges of restriction enzymes that do their (read on...)

by Dan on January 28, 2008

Continuing with the recent theme on model organisms, there is the nematode (roundworm) Caenorhabditis elegans. This organisms is particularly useful owing to the fact that it has very defined development patterns involving fixed (read on...)

by Nick on January 28, 2008

Please read and pass this life-saving information on to your friends. A chemical that all of us use in the lab has turned out to be highly dangerous. It is an asphyxiant, can cause severe burns and is a contributor to the (read on...)

by Dan on January 24, 2008

Another popular model organism is the African Clawed Frog, Xenopus laevis, which is extremely useful for studying development and cellular physiology, owing to its particularly large and easy manipulable oocytes and (read on...)