by Bala on April 2, 2008

For identifying positive clones from a plasmid cloning procedure, the routine of performing a mini-prep and then checking the putative clones by restriction digestion is most commonly used. Of course, if you need to screen a (read on...)

by Nick on March 19, 2008

A while back, I wrote an article on 5 DNA ligation tips that could improve the efficiency of your cloning procedures. It proved to be quite a popular article so here are another 3 tips that might make your ligations even (read on...)

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 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 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 Nick on January 23, 2008

Routine PCR? Let's be honest, there's no such thing. Even with the simplest PCR reaction things can go wrong, so you need to have a good checklist of ideas for troubleshooting and rectifying the problem. Today I have brainstormed (read on...)

by Nick on January 17, 2008

A while back I wrote a post on a T4 DNA polymerase dependent ligation independent cloning method. In the comments, Max asked if anyone had a protocol. Since there does not appear to be a simplified protocol available on the web, (read on...)

by Nick on January 8, 2008

Are you stuck in cloning hell?, Tired of doing ligations that don’t work? Want a faster, more efficient cloning procedure?... You should try ligation independent cloning. A growing number of researchers swear by ligation (read on...)