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Victoria Doronina

Vicki did her PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh. She had been working as a postdoc in several Russel group UK universities while honing her skills in scientific and creative writing. She is now a Technical Officer at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and pen for hire. Check out my proudest achievement, which may be useful for you: The BiteSizeBio Guide for Protein expression

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Articles by Victoria Doronina

An image of rusted railings to depict rust in your incubator.

What To Do About Rust in Your Incubator

By Vicki Doronina | July 9, 2016

Rust spots provide a good shelter for bugs, which will get there one day, and from the rust into your tissue culture. Here’s what you can do to deal with the problem as soon as you see it.

Top Tips for Yeast Microscopy

Top Tips for Yeast Microscopy

By Vicki Doronina | May 19, 2015

Microscopy is one of the fun parts of working with yeast. If you fix your cells, you can get a snapshot of the structures. Live cells microscopy using fluorescent proteins tagged proteins is even better, as you can see the dynamics and cell machinery working before your own eyes. Light Microscopy to Check for Contamination…

Career Highlight: Technical Officer

Career Highlight: Technical Officer

By Vicki Doronina | May 18, 2015

An ad about a Technical Officer position is usually nebulous. For example: “The post holder work as part of a technical team and provide both routine and specialist services in support of undergraduate, postgraduate, outreach and revenue-earning activities.” What Does a Technical Officer Do? In fact, a technical officer role can be summarized in two…

Top Tips on How to Prevent Cell Line Cross-Contamination

Top Tips on How to Prevent Cell Line Cross-Contamination

By Vicki Doronina | April 22, 2015

Recently we wrote an article about widespread cell culture contamination and how to detect it. This follow-up article will provide practical tips on avoiding cross-contamination in the first place. Be Cautious While Working The first way of cross-contaminating cultures is by accidentally mixing two cultures together, which may lead to an unintended co-culture or the displacement…

Gene Synthesis: Cloning of The Future?

Gene Synthesis: Cloning of The Future?

By Vicki Doronina | April 20, 2015

I remember the time when elves and wizards walked the Earth and DNA oligonucleotide synthesis was $5 a nucleotide. But the world has changed, nobody thinks twice about ordering an oligo. Whole gene synthesis, which is synthesis of long oligos and their assembly into a very, very long oligo. With prices of around 25–35 cents per…

Cell Culture: a Case of Mistaken Identity

Cell Culture: a Case of Mistaken Identity

By Vicki Doronina | April 20, 2015

While working in a UK university, I met a researcher who loved Italy much more than the UK. I asked her why she had left her favourite country. She told me that before coming to the UK, she had a 2-year fellowship in Italy where she was getting some promising results and had the chance…

Banish the Background with Toxin–antitoxin Cloning Systems

Banish the Background with Toxin–antitoxin Cloning Systems

By Vicki Doronina | February 16, 2015

One of the most annoying traits of “classical cloning” is an imperfect system of discriminating between the clones containing an empty vector and vector with insert after cloning. Even when your self-ligation control plate is empty, you can have a lot of colonies containing an empty vector on the “vector + insert” plate. Even the blue-white…

Assembling the Puzzle: Cloning with Compatible Cohesive Ends

Assembling the Puzzle: Cloning with Compatible Cohesive Ends

By Vicki Doronina | October 17, 2014

Consider a jigsaw puzzle. While most of the pieces have a different picture on their surface, all pieces fit together in an interlocking pattern. As unlikely as it may seem, restriction enzymes from different organisms can produce interlocking pieces of DNA – so called compatible cohesive ends (CCE). These are pieces of DNA, which fit…

DIY method for isolating yeast

A DIY Method for Isolating Yeast Genomic DNA

By Vicki Doronina | October 8, 2014

Look Ma, No Kit! Unlike with kits, there are no propriety reagents in a DIY protocol. You know what exactly is in each reagent. The DIY approach is catching on!

A Sneak Peak at ‘The Bitesize Bio Guide to Protein Expression’ – a Bitesize Bio eBook

A Sneak Peak at ‘The Bitesize Bio Guide to Protein Expression’ – a Bitesize Bio eBook

By Vicki Doronina | September 23, 2014

If I piqued your interest in the first post about my new e-Book ‘The Bitesize Bio Guide to Protein Expression – a Bitesize Bio eBook’ check out this excerpt from the book explaining what an expression system is and how to choose the right one.  What is an expression system anyway? There was a time…

Stand By Your Poster

Stand By Your Poster

By Vicki Doronina | September 8, 2014

A lot of scientists hate presenting posters. Because more often than not, you stand near your carefully designed, full of great results placard, all alone, while there is a crowd gathered two posters down. There are some conclusions you could come to: You might think that the popular poster author’s work is brilliant – unlike…

Dpn I The Strange

Dpn I The Strange

By Vicki Doronina | August 15, 2014

If you ever used a site-directed mutagenesis kit or ligation-independent cloning, then you also used restriction enzyme Dpn I. But what does it do and more interestingly, why? Restriction enzymes and methylases: the yin and yang of bacteria Usual restriction enzymes, the toolkit of genetic engineering, are one half of the “yin and yang” pair…

Seven Frivolous Reasons Not to Attend a Conference

Seven Frivolous Reasons Not to Attend a Conference

By Vicki Doronina | August 13, 2014

Scientific conferences are a peculiar throwback to XIX century, when bearded white men in wool suits were meeting in ale houses to discuss the latest experiment they did at home – once. In our time of instant communication and telepresence, conferences are obsolete and I’ll tell you why. 1. The main reason not to go…

Kick Start Your Research With Crowdfunding!

Kick Start Your Research With Crowdfunding!

By Vicki Doronina | August 6, 2014

Like most scientists, you rely on grant monies to fund your research. Sustaining it depends on your ability to devise promising new ideas, collect new data and show proof-of-concept before writing another proposal to keep the cycle going. Only the best-of-the-best pilot projects seem to make the cut for experimentation when scarce lab funds are…

Shooting Trouble During Cloning

Shooting Trouble During Cloning

By Vicki Doronina | July 4, 2014

As frustration goes, cloning is often up there with trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle. You do everything carefully: prepare your vector and fragment DNA, cut them as the restriction enzyme manufacturer instructs (complete digest in five minutes!), ligate, transform and go home in anticipation of a good number of…

Tips for Heating up Agar in the Microwave

Tips for Heating up Agar in the Microwave

By Vicki Doronina | February 17, 2014

One of our readers posted the following question to us and we decided to pass it along to everybody’s favorite microbiology expert, Aunt Yersinia: For one year I am working in different research laboratories, after I got from school. I keep wondering why EVERYBODY is using pre-made Agar solutions for pouring plates, and EVERYBODY is…

How to scale up a PCR reaction

How to scale up a PCR reaction

By Vicki Doronina | December 2, 2013

Scientific creativity and repetitive tasks do not go well together.  There is nothing worse than having to repeat the same task over and over again – I know somebody who quit science because of this and became a castle curator. So how do you minimise the amount of one of the most repetitive tasks –…

Focus on Isoelectric Focusing

Focus on Isoelectric Focusing

By Vicki Doronina | October 21, 2013

Isoelectric focusing electrophoresis (IEF) of proteins is nowhere near as popular as its cousin – sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis aka SDS-PAGE. While in both methods the proteins are denatured, IEF is a gel-based electrophoretic separation of proteins using difference in their overall charges. The sodium dodecyl sulphate – SDS part of the usual gel…

An image of lab furniture to depict how not to wreck your autoclave.

How to Identify Protein Motifs from Protein Sequences

By Vicki Doronina | October 7, 2013

Wouldn’t it be great to put your nucleotide sequence into a program and get back a 3D-structure of your protein and a full description of its functions? In theory, because the protein 3D-structure is determined by the aminoacid sequence, given the right algorithm and a powerful enough computer, this should be simple.  In practice, because…

Bad Reference? It's Not the End of Your Science Career

Bad Reference? It’s Not the End of Your Science Career

By Vicki Doronina | September 18, 2013

The conventional sequence for getting a new job in science (or anywhere else) goes like this: 1) Apply for job 2) Get an interview 3) Ace the interview 4) Pray that your references hold up. So if you had a bad relationship with your last boss, you’re in trouble. Because no matter how well you…

An image of colors to depict care for your pH meter.

Easy Yeast RNA isolation without the Trizol

By Vicki Doronina | September 9, 2013

Recently BsB author Yevgeniy Grigoryev shared a total RNA isolation protocol. The one I use is even simpler—no expensive Trizol, which is a mix of phenol and some salts, all that is required is some Tris, SDS and phenol/chloroform mix. I have never used this protocol on non-yeast cells but I am almost sure that…

Where to publish negative results

Where to publish negative results

By Vicki Doronina | August 21, 2013

I met a final year PhD student once, who told me a sad story. His supervisor had a plausible idea that exercise reduces the chances of developing bowel cancer. To test the hypothesis, the student made a transgenic mouse with an increased incidence of bowel cancer and got the mice to run (or not run)…

Alternatives to presenting your science with Powerpoint

Alternatives to presenting your science with Powerpoint

By Vicki Doronina | July 29, 2013

I was shocked recently at a seminar called  “Writing with style” by the Manchester University writer-in-residence, Chris Simms. He opened by saying that he has never done a presentation using Powerpoint in his life. What? Surely biologists and PowerPoint presentations (PPT) go together like biologists and white lab coats. They teach you to make PPTs…

Science and the Media – Dos and Don’ts

Science and the Media – Dos and Don’ts

By Vicki Doronina | July 3, 2013

Have you ever wondered how the media can write (often cringingly inaccurately) about a recently published scientific paper? Attending Standing up for Science media workshop organised by the Sense about Science charity shed a lot of light on this issue for me There are times when the media are hungry for any news, mostly during…

10 Top Everyday Items Useful in the Lab

10 Top Everyday Items Useful in the Lab

By Vicki Doronina | June 26, 2013

Every research lab is full of equipment specially designed for specific technical and experimental requirements, unfortunately this means said equipment is often expensive. Thankfully there are simple and cheap everyday items which can help you with your experiments and generally make life a lot easier. 1)  Perforated metal ladle – to fish out samples from…

Common Sins When Weighing Out Chemicals

Common Sins When Weighing Out Chemicals

By Vicki Doronina | February 13, 2013

You can really tell when Honours Project students start working in the lab on their projects: the pH meter probe is suddenly floating in water and the weighing area is a mess, because nobody had time to explain “the weighing etiquette”. Fret no more! We will spell it out and you can print it out…

The Reproducibility Initiative: Let Them Eat Cake!

The Reproducibility Initiative: Let Them Eat Cake!

By Vicki Doronina | February 1, 2013

Despite obvious differences between the Korean professor-biotechnologist Hwang Woo-suk and German-born postdoc Jan Hendrik Schön, who used to work in the US on semiconductors, both of these scientists have something in common. Since Hwang Woo-suk’s and Schön’s groundbreaking articles were published in Nature and Science, nobody has been able to reproduce their results  and the…

Second Chance Saloon: How to Western Blot a Coomassie-stained gel

Second Chance Saloon: How to Western Blot a Coomassie-stained gel

By Vicki Doronina | January 21, 2013

In her article How to Get Perfect Protein Transfer in Western Blotting, Emily Crow recommends Coomassie staining your gel after transfer to the membrane to check the quality of the transfer. A good transfer should not leave behind proteins and PVDF membrane, stained by 0.1% Ponceau S in  5% phosphoric acid and destained with water…

What Is Open Access Anyway?

By Vicki Doronina | January 7, 2013

It is a truth universally acknowledged that free cheese exists only in a mousetrap, and even there it’s free only to the end user. So it’s no wonder that the traditional system of most scientific publications through publishing houses seems to be fair. A publishing house (PH) employs editors as well as technical personnel to…

Restriction Enzyme Wars: The Natural Function Of Restriction Enzymes

By Vicki Doronina | December 14, 2012

Parents  of small children attending nursery know that the period of time from September to June is a succession of colds and flues for the whole family – children with their underdeveloped immune system exchange viruses, creating new potent strains. Well, that’s probably how bacteria feel all the time in the natural environment teeming with…

Antibiotic Stability: Keep Your (Gun)powder Dry

Antibiotic Stability: Keep Your (Gun)powder Dry

By Vicki Doronina | November 30, 2012

The stability of an antibiotic depends on its chemical structure, method of isolation (from natural sources or chemical synthesis), and the mechanisms of inactivation. First generation antibiotics isolated from natural sources, such as penicillin, are the most unstable, followed by its semisynthetic derivatives (such as ampicillin and carboxycylin).  Aminoglycosides (kanamicin, spectinomycin, etc.) are more stable.…

DIY method for isolating yeast

Top Ten Tips for TAP

By Vicki Doronina | November 14, 2012

Tandem affinity purification (TAP) is a versatile technique allowing the isolation of proteins for various purposes including Western blot and mass-spectrometry. The target protein is fused with protein A from streptococcus and the calmodulin binding domain, which together comprise the TAP-tag (for an introduction to TAP-tagging, see this article). To purify a TAP-tagged protein from…

DEPC: The Wicked Witch of RNA?

DEPC: The Wicked Witch of RNA?

By Vicki Doronina | October 10, 2012

If you have ever worked with RNA, you know about DEPC (diethylpyrocarbonate). You add it to water at a concentration of 0.1%, shake or stir, incubate at 37°C for two hours or at room temperature overnight and, as if targeted by a magic bullet, the RNAses that may have been in the water are gone.…

How to Amplify Difficult PCR Substrates

How to Amplify Difficult PCR Substrates

By Vicki Doronina | September 14, 2012

During my postgraduate studies, I did literally one PCR reaction with a pre-optimised protocol on a not especially difficult template. So my karma came back with vengeance, when as a part of my first postdoc I had to amplify a template containing a 35 bp-long GC-rich stem-loop, which proved to be extremely difficult. This was…

Zero Tolerance: A Perfectionist's Guide to Aseptic Technique

Zero Tolerance: A Perfectionist’s Guide to Aseptic Technique

By Vicki Doronina | August 29, 2012

Arguably, molecular biology is impossible without microbiology – even if you work exclusively with transgenic mice, you may one day need to amplify a vector in E. coli. And microbiology is definitely impossible without good aseptic technique. The main principle of good microbiological practice is a zero tolerance approach: it’s good to be a little…

An image of different sized leaves to depict kit-free midiprep.

How to Do a Kit-free Midiprep

By Vicki Doronina | July 23, 2012

Here, we share a protocol for a midiprep, which, if not faster, gives a larger plasmid DNA yield than any commercial midiprep kit.

Got Phage? Here's how to get rid of it.

Got Phage? Here’s how to get rid of it.

By Vicki Doronina | July 18, 2012

Summertime… The birds are singing, the trees are growing. Your tissue culture has sprouted yeast contamination, your yeast culture is happily growing bacteria. Your bacterial culture was growing calmly and predictably, dividing every twenty minutes, but suddenly its optical density has dropped, and it’s full of some sort of filaments and clumps. Or you did…

The Easiest Yeast Transformation Protocol on Earth

The Easiest Yeast Transformation Protocol on Earth

By Vicki Doronina | June 22, 2012

There are several yeast transformation protocols around, and most of them require a lot of steps: overnight starter culture, dilution and growth to logarithmic phase, several washes, and so on… These protocols work very well since they have been optimised for maximum transformation efficiency, which is needed for applications like library construction. But they are…

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