Several years ago as a freshman in a research lab, the very first project I received was to pipette incremental micro-volumes of H2O onto a piece of parafilm. Boring! Weighing the liquid on parafilm and comparing the weight between 10 replicates for each micro-volume continued for a week before I touched anything else in that [...]

Using UNG is a great trick for PCR amplicon decontamination, but is it any good for rtPCR?

PCR is highly sensitive, but the downside of that very property is that it makes the technique prone to producing false-positives. In labs where PCR is a staple, like the one I work in, any false-positives are more often than not due to amplicon contamination. A broken capillary or a PCR plate left carelessly at [...]

I recently visited a lab that had a salad spinner on their lab bench and at first I wondered if they were putting together a salad lunch there but when I took a peek I got a nice surprise. It turns out that the salad spinner was actually a bench top, “minifuge” version of a [...]

Hydrolysis probes, commonly also referred to as TaqmanTM is a very popular chemistry for real-time PCR. In this article I will compare hydrolysis probes with PlexorTM. But first, a quick overview of hydrolysis probes. Hydrolysis probes, an overview Hydrolysis probes are a popular detection chemistry for monitoring sequence-specific amplification in RTPCR. Just like with  SYBR [...]

In my last article I introduced you to the Plexor System. And from that we already know that while in reactions that user SYBR Green for detection, fluorescence increases with accumulation of PCR product, with Plexor the fluoresence decreases. Today I want to compare some other well-known features of SYBR Green chemistry and see how [...]

In real-time PCR, there are two primary ways to detect amplicons using fluorescent monitoring. One is intercalator-based dyes such as SYBR Green, and the other is probe-based techniques (hydrolysis or hybridization probes). All of these methods share a similar mechanism of measuring increasing fluorescence during amplification. But there is another completely different way to quantitatively [...]

When I first heard of touchdown PCR, I thought of a landing aircraft, which, as it turns out is not a bad way to think about it. But despite it’s amenability to analogies and dreadful puns (see title), touch-down PCR (TD-PCR), a very useful technique for improving PCR amplification specificity, is trickier that it might [...]

Controls are obviously extremely important when setting up experiments. Without them, meaningful interpretation of the experimental results can be impossible. I say obviously, but in my previous job as a technical services scientist, you’d be surprised at how often I found myself talking to customers about the importance of controls. One customer commented, during our [...]

I had previously talked about the basics of cell-free protein synthesis and ways to improve yields from the technique. But recently I came across an article describing a technology that promises to dramatically improve the efficiency of cell free protein synthesis. The article, published in Nature Materials by Dan Lou et al from Cornell University, [...]