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Olwen Reina

I am a Clinical Research Coordinator at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs with a background in basic research, writing, mentoring and teaching. I studied Natural Science at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, specializing in biochemistry with immunology and I am currently undergoing ACRP (Association of Clinical Research Professionals) certification. In my spare time, I enjoy studying HTML/CSS and SEO, doing acroyoga, making kombucha, salsa dancing, voluntary community projects and eating sushi. Feel free to send me a note with any writing opportunities or to say hello.

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Articles by Olwen Reina

Wooden blocks spelling DIY DNA for Build your own PCR machine.

How to Build Your Own PCR Machine

By Olwen Reina | November 23, 2022

You can build your own PCR machine using tools and equipment you can get easily and without breaking the bank. Well, what are you waiting for?

Learn how to calibrate your lab balance.

How to Clean and Calibrate Your Lab Balance

By Olwen Reina | August 24, 2022

Here’s an easy guide on how to maintain your lab balance. Following these tips will ensure your balance remains clean and perhaps most importantly, accurate.

Scientists with DNA to depict problems amplifying GC-rich regions

Problems Amplifying GC-rich regions? 5 Easy Solutions

By Olwen Reina | June 22, 2022

Are you having problems amplifying GC-rich regions in your PCR reactions? Read this article for 5 easy tips to address these issues!

quiet day no fellowship applications

Making the Most of Quiet Days in the Lab: From Gloomy to Glorious

By Olwen Reina | November 29, 2016

It’s Monday morning. You arrive in the lab armed with a large coffee and feeling rested after a non-lab weekend. You check your email and calendar and peek into your PI’s office. Today will be a rare non-experimental day, a day that some love and others dread: a day to clean up and get ready…

SAGE Part 2: LongSAGE, RL-SAGE and SuperSAGE

SAGE Part 2: LongSAGE, RL-SAGE and SuperSAGE

By Olwen Reina | September 22, 2016

SAGE, or serial analysis of gene expression, is a technique that enables you to digitally analyze the entire gene expression profile of a cell(s). Before this technique, scientists were limited to studying a few gene’s expression at once by a technique called the expressed sequence tag approach. The coolest part of SAGE is you don’t…

Vital for Soup, Vital for Labs: Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE), part 1

Vital for Soup, Vital for Labs: Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE), part 1

By Olwen Reina | September 20, 2016

Some techniques can sound very dry but this isn’t one of them! SAGE was first described and published by Velculescu et al. in 1995. At the time, techniques like RNA blotting and expressed sequence tagging were used to study gene expression. However techniques like these were slow and very limited. The speed of SAGE and…

Extraction

Top 10 Tips for Phenol-Chloroform Extractions and Ethanol Precipitations

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

Phenol-chloroform extractions and ethanol precipitations can be a royal pain, but here are some tips to help you get tip-top results!

Time to Instigate Nested PCR

Time to Instigate Nested PCR

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

How to Obtain a Purer PCR Product and Reduce Non-specific Amplification Unless you’ve gotten your hands on some miraculously specific primers, amplification of only your target sequence without non-specific amplification can be very challenging. Thankfully, a clever and surprisingly simple solution is at hand! A Quick Recap of the Basics In PCR, you design your…

The BOOM Method for Nucleic Acid Purification: The Ultimate Chick Flick?

The BOOM Method for Nucleic Acid Purification: The Ultimate Chick Flick?

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

The Boom method, or Boom nucleic acid extraction method, is a solid phase extraction technique for isolating nucleic acids from a solution of biological matter. This is just a fancy way of saying you use this technique to expose and remove the nucleic acids from a cell. First developed by William R. Boom, the Boom…

My job as a Clinical Study Coordinator

My job as a Clinical Study Coordinator

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

Clinical Trial Coordinator, Clinical Study Coordinator, and Clinical Research Coordinator are all names for the same job and refer to the person responsible for the day-to-day running of human trials. Usually when I tell someone that I’m a Clinical Study Coordinator, they have no idea what that means. I guess it’s like when someone tells…

3 Carcinoma Cells, 2 Stromal Cells and a Partridge in a Pear Tree: An Introduction to Cell Co-Culture

3 Carcinoma Cells, 2 Stromal Cells and a Partridge in a Pear Tree: An Introduction to Cell Co-Culture

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

The first thing you learn about culturing cells is proper aseptic technique and avoiding contamination. After that you’ll learn all the ins and outs of culturing your project’s specific cell line(s). What may not have been covered, is co-culturing, and I don’t just mean ethnic diversity in the lab! Co-culturing is the indirect or direct…

The Nope-Nope-Nevers of Using a Flow Cytometer

The Nope-Nope-Nevers of Using a Flow Cytometer

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

There are some wonderful toys in the lab that enable us to open up a whole new world in science. One of those is a rather pricey and an incredibly sensitive laser-based apparatus capable of counting and sorting cells, detecting biomarkers, and engineering proteins: the flow cytometer. By propelling cells through the path of the…

Comparing Viral Vector Expression Systems

Comparing Viral Vector Expression Systems

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

Some viral vectors are the little black dresses of cloning and expression experiments: They work for almost any occasion and always give you the results you were hoping for. Other vectors are more like ballgowns that only come out of storage for special occasions. Let’s wade through all the information out there and take a…

When PCR Gets RACE-y: From Unknown mRNA Segments to Sequenced cDNA

When PCR Gets RACE-y: From Unknown mRNA Segments to Sequenced cDNA

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

Normally you need two primers to amplify your segment of interest – one for the 3′ end of your segment of interest and one for your 5′ end. But if you don’t know the sequence of the regions you’re hoping to amplify this can be a problem! Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends (RACE) is a…

Native Versus Denaturing Gels

Native Versus Denaturing Gels

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

We’re already gone through the basics of how gel electrophoresis work, compared common gel types like agarose and polyacrylamide and even explored some alternatives. Now let’s look at the native versus denaturing gels. You’ll be a speGEList in no time! Denaturing Gels We’ll start with this one, as it’s very self-explanatory. Denaturing gels are exactly…

Protein Extraction and Solubilization using the TRIZOL® Method

Protein Extraction and Solubilization using the TRIZOL® Method

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

Extracting protein from tissue samples and cultured cells is Step #1 in many biochemical and analytical techniques. Before you can do a Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis (PAGE), a Western blot, or mass spectrometry you need to extract your protein. Nowadays, a lot of labs have switched to kits for their protein extraction but these kits can…

Expanding Possibilities: Why You Need to Look into Viral Transduction

Expanding Possibilities: Why You Need to Look into Viral Transduction

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

We have already looked into the different types of viral expression systems and when you might use one over another in my previous article. But why would you use viral transduction over similar techniques like plasmids? Just a reminder: Transfection is a lab technique where nucleic acids or proteins may be introduced into cells. When…

Origami in Nature: Protein Structure Prediction

Origami in Nature: Protein Structure Prediction

By Olwen Reina | July 9, 2016

Predicting how proteins will fold in vivo is a Holy Grail of proteomics and theoretical chemistry. Current hopes are that this can be achieved by designing an in silico platform that can predict protein folding, either de novo (a.k.a. from scratch) or using known proteins as a guide. What would we need to do, why…

thermal springs to show the extreme environment where good DNA polymerases for PCR can be found

Get To Know Your DNA Polymerases

By Olwen Reina | June 18, 2015

While most may think standard Taq is the backbone of PCR, many other DNA polymerase options exist. The polymerase you use significantly impacts the efficacy of your PCR, specifically on the product yield, the purity of the product, and the faithfulness with which the starting product is transcribed. Sometimes, these matter less, and quick and…

Fuzzy Wuzzy Problems: Achieving and Maintaining a Contamination-free Incubator

Fuzzy Wuzzy Problems: Achieving and Maintaining a Contamination-free Incubator

By Olwen Reina | June 17, 2015

When you share an incubator with a number of people it can be very hard to keep a clean shop and months, or more, of work can be lost due to contamination. The two biggest sources of bugs in an incubator are: the water pan the containers being put in and out. Both of these…

Capillary Gel Electrophoresis: An Alternative to SDS-PAGE?

Capillary Gel Electrophoresis: An Alternative to SDS-PAGE?

By Olwen Reina | May 19, 2015

When you think about separating proteins, do you think about separating them using a gel? Specifically using SDS-PAGE? If you answered “yes”, it is for good reason. SDS-PAGE is ubiquitous in molecular biology labs because it is good at separating proteins. However, SDS-PAGE takes a lot of time and is labor-intensive. So let’s expand your…

Seamless Ligation Cloning Extract (SLiCE) Explored and Explained

Seamless Ligation Cloning Extract (SLiCE) Explored and Explained

By Olwen Reina | May 18, 2015

Traditionally, if you’re hoping to clone a DNA/RNA fragment (or insert) into a vector, such as a BAC you would need: Expensive exonucleases, called restriction enzymes: pacman-like enzymes that chomp at specific sequences in your destination vector or fragments to be inserted (often just “inserts”). Sequence homologies between your inserts and your destination vector, called…

Polymerase Incomplete Primer Extension (PIPE) Cloning Method

Polymerase Incomplete Primer Extension (PIPE) Cloning Method

By Olwen Reina | May 4, 2015

PIPE PCR is a ligase-independent, restriction enzyme-free cloning strategy like SLIC (link to my SLIC article), SLiCE and CPEC. The PIPE method eliminates sequence constraints and reduces cloning and site mutagenesis to a single PCR step followed by product treatment. It is fast, cost-effective and highly efficient. The key step is designing the primers; one…

How to Be Greener - The Environmentally Friendly Guide to PCR

How to Be Greener – The Environmentally Friendly Guide to PCR

By Olwen Reina | March 19, 2015

Science is an expensive business and those who use high energy-demanding techniques may not even realize just how expensive they are. The Cost of PCR Let’s looks at PCR. You need to pay for the machine, all the ingredients including expensive enzymes, a freezer and a fridge for your ingredients, tubes and caps, not to…

The 10 Unspoken Rules of Working in a Lab

The 10 Unspoken Rules of Working in a Lab

By Olwen Reina | February 9, 2015

There are so many unspoken rules to working in a lab! It’s unnerving what will cause frayed nerves to snap, people not to trust you and a good relationship to turn sour. Here are some of the rules I’ve learned. Feel free to add more in the comments section below. 1. Thou Shalt Not Touch…

Finding Nemo: Understanding Single Cell Isolation and PCR Amplification

Finding Nemo: Understanding Single Cell Isolation and PCR Amplification

By Olwen Reina | February 5, 2015

Every protocol for single cell PCR can be broken down into two steps. In the first step, the cells are isolated by micromanipulation, laser capture microdissection, flow cytometry, or by direct micropipetting. Next, the genetic material is processed by PCR to amplify your sequence of interest. Here, we’ll go through the different options for isolating…

Six Ways to Measure T Cell Responses

Six Ways to Measure T Cell Responses

By Olwen Reina | January 21, 2015

T cells can be problematic to characterise because they have a wide variety of subtypes and because of the technical difficulties of studying the membrane-bound T cell receptor, but there are situations where you want to be able to do this such as analysing the degree to which immunological memory has been induced to measuring…

Letting Go of Your Ligase: Transfer PCR

Letting Go of Your Ligase: Transfer PCR

By Olwen Reina | January 2, 2015

When I buy a new sweater, I love finding out that it goes with several pairs of pants, the scarf that’s an awkward color and the earrings I haven’t worn yet. PCR is like this sweater –  it goes with almost everything and molecular biology is taking full advantage of this using it at every…

Say Goodbye to Restriction Enzymes and Ligases: An Introduction to Sequence and Ligase Independent Cloning (SLIC)

Say Goodbye to Restriction Enzymes and Ligases: An Introduction to Sequence and Ligase Independent Cloning (SLIC)

By Olwen Reina | November 21, 2014

SLIC, or sequence and ligase independent cloning, was developed by Li in 2007 and published in Nature Methods. What makes it a Nature Methods worthy protocol? Unlike other forms of cloning, SLIC does not require restriction enzymes or a ligase! Seriously! Don’t believe me? Why not have a go for yourself? I’ve detailed the main steps below to get you started. How it works To…

Thermal Asymmetric Interlaced PCR (TAIL-PCR)

Thermal Asymmetric Interlaced PCR (TAIL-PCR)

By Olwen Reina | October 26, 2014

What do bunnies, coins and PCR have in common? They all have tails! (ha ha!) Thermal asymmetric interlaced PCR or TAIL-PCR is used to sequence and analyse unknown DNA fragments that are adjacent to known sequences. Think of it as being rather like networking. You know you want to get to know someone so you…

Which Cytokine Will I Get? How to Stimulate Human Cytokine-Producing Cells

Which Cytokine Will I Get? How to Stimulate Human Cytokine-Producing Cells

By Olwen Reina | October 20, 2014

Cells are like people: depending on their current environment, past experiences and their genetic make-up they will react differently. Treat cells in different ways, and they will produce different cytokines. There are a lot of protocols out there for stimulating cells. Depending on the species of cells you plan to stimulate, different protocols are available…

Tissue Culture Room

Tips for a Happily Functioning Tissue Culture Room

By Olwen Reina | October 13, 2014

You walk into your tissue culture room to find a window open, the incubator’s humidity tray empty and a pipette lying on its side in the hood on a used glove… After you have found and torn to shreds the person responsible for this monstrous act (!!), consider posting the below tips to help those…

How to Clean a Tissue Culture Incubator

How to Clean a Tissue Culture Incubator

By Olwen Reina | October 6, 2014

  A few years ago, I was doing research in a lab in Ireland. Our lab, among many others, was moving to a new building. Everything was chaotic. Half our equipment was in the old building and the new lab was creepishly empty. The fire alarm went off every few days. There was a constant…

Don’t Have the Blues: Make the Lac Operon Work for You

Don’t Have the Blues: Make the Lac Operon Work for You

By Olwen Reina | October 3, 2014

Glucose is the preferred food source for E. coli, however when glucose levels drop, E. coli need to look for other ways to feed themselves. One way in which they accomplish this is to replace glucose metabolism with lactose metabolism. The induction and control of lactose metabolism is complicated and its process has been exploited…

A Beginner’s Guide to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Technology

A Beginner’s Guide to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Technology

By Olwen Reina | October 2, 2014

The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 ushered in a new era of rapid, affordable, and accurate genome analysis—called Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). NGS builds upon “first generation sequencing” technologies to yield accurate and cost-effective sequencing results. Fred Sanger sequenced the first whole DNA genome, the virus phage ?X174, in 1977. In that…

The 9 Online Calculators You Need to Know About

The 9 Online Calculators You Need to Know About

By Olwen Reina | October 1, 2014

When you think of a “calculator”, you probably think of the plastic gadget in your lab desk drawer or an app that came with your phone. But there are so many helpful calculators online that do a lot more than just add and subtract numbers. Here is a list of some of the wonderfully convenient…

The Lac Operon Explained

The Lac Operon Explained

By Olwen Reina | September 22, 2014

An operon is a functioning unit of genomic DNA that contains a group of genes controlled by a single promoter. Put simply, these genes share information needed to create the tools for a particular task so they share a promoter ensuring they’ll all be transcribed together. The lac, or lactose, operon is found in E.…

Heating up agar? Just add a cup of water and avoid the glitter and crumbs

Heating up agar? Just add a cup of water and avoid the glitter and crumbs

By Olwen Reina | September 22, 2014

It’s ironic how much folklore and superstition comes with being in science. “That’s a lucky pipette”, “playing Bach for your cells will help them grow”, “always make your own solutions”; we all have our own tips. Some of them might be well-founded others not so much… Tips from trusted colleagues can be very helpful though.…

The History of PCR

The History of PCR

By Olwen Reina | September 18, 2014

As with some of the greatest discoveries in science, from penicillin to microwave ovens and play-doh, PCR was discovered serendipitously. Thanks to the work of many scientists, including Watson and Crick, Kornberg, Khorana, Klenow, Kleppe (so many K’s…) and Sanger, all the main ingredients for PCR had been described by 1980. Like butter, flour, eggs,…

Mischief in the Mastermix: Bothersome Bubbles

Mischief in the Mastermix: Bothersome Bubbles

By Olwen Reina | September 9, 2014

It happens to the best of us. You’re minding your own business and suddenly out of nowhere your mastermix is a bubble bath and your primers are enjoying a froth party. Let’s talk about how to deal with these foamy fiends! When you’re making up your mastermix, you could have a variety of ingredients going…

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