The fourth Thursday of November marks the annual tradition in the U.S. called Thanksgiving. Originally, Thanksgiving was a religious holiday that has sinced turned secular and became a national holiday in 1941. Now, for families celebrating Thanskgiving, it is a time to cook a whole lot of food and eat way too much pumpkin pie. [...]

In a previous article, I listed some ways that people annoy their co-workers and many of you added some of your own pet peeves. Now I would like to discuss some ways to be the lab favorite, also known as the “golden child”. Does your lab have a “golden child”? Someone who is always perfect, [...]

I don’t need to tell you that you can find (virtually) everything you need to know on the internet — encylopedias are a thing of the past. Now, you have an app for that on your phone. You don’t even need to wait to get home. So it makes total sense that for science, we [...]

Every day you go into the lab and you spend the 8-14 hours with the same group of people. And when you spend that much time with people, bench to bench, for anywhere from 3-6 years, you really need to learn how to get along. Usually, after some time, most people learn the rules of [...]

If you’re like many researchers, problems with PCR amplifying high GC DNA templates will be a major annoyance for you.  Many strategies developed to overcome this issue. Betaine is the most common PCR additive used to enhance amplification of GC rich sequences because of its ability to dissolve secondary structure that blocks polymerase action.  But [...]

qPCR is a technique used daily in most labs, but the first step, designing your primers, can be the biggest obstacle to even getting started. Without a good pair of primers, you can’t start asking the real questions and generating data.  And sometimes the effort involved in optimizing an assay for high efficiency and sensitivity can be [...]

When was the last time you had to give blood or a swab sample for a test, such as for a cold or flu, or some other virus? Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the test results? If the test is FDA approved, then you can rest easy knowing that the test went [...]

Each winter, the flu season peaks in January as new strains of virus emerge and spread among school age children, elderly and immunocompromised members of the population. Diagnosis of flu, and other infectious diseases, puts serious strain on public health labs.  But the intense pressure to handle more samples faster is driving development of new innovative [...]

Formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissues are valuable samples that typically come from human specimens collected for examination of the histology of biopsies for the detection of cancer. But each sample contains much more information just waiting to be unlocked. Despite the tiny sample size, DNA can be extracted from the tissue sections and used [...]

So you have some blood stored in the -20C or -80C and you want to isolate RNA from the samples. If you wanted DNA, you would have many products to choose from. But for RNA, your choices are more limited. Obtaining RNA from frozen blood is difficult Why is that?  The reason is that most RNA [...]