What do you get when you cross eastern medicine with molecular biology? How about a novel way to isolate mRNA from living cells using acupuncture? That’s just one of many projects going on in Dr. Karl Hasenstein’s lab at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Original research performed by Dr. Hasenstein’s lab and presented at the CHI [...]

If you want to isolate plasmid DNA, you crack your cells open and carry out a miniprep, trying very hard not to get any contaminating genomic DNA in your sample. If you want genomic DNA, you crack your cells open in a different way and try to isolate as much of the stuff as possible. [...]

Science attracts so many different and quirky personalities that you are bound to have a problem with some people. But when your boss is the problem, its a big problem for you. So what do you do when you don’t get along with your boss? Well sometimes the best advice is really to just move [...]

As a scientist in academia or industry, you spend a large portion of your time looking up and reading research papers. What if instead of printing out piles of papers and taking them home to read all weekend, you could click on a video and visualize the experiments and results by the actual researchers doing [...]

Are you tired of having to clean dingy, moldy waterbaths? Or tired of babysitting the heat block to make sure the temperature stayed where you set it? Well there is a new solution to this problem. I just recently discovered something called Bath Armor by a company called Lab Armor. I was walking by my [...]

Real-time PCR is a specialized technique that delivers far more information about your DNA or RNA than end-point PCR. Essentially, real-time PCR is a way to visualize the amplification of specific DNA fragments as it is happening (in real time) and allows for the ability to quantify exactly how much DNA (or RNA) was in [...]

What better way to kick off 2009 than with an overview of some of the most popular scientific conferences for researchers from all over the world? The experience of attending a scientific conference is invaluable for learning how to communicate your research and for staying at the cutting edge of science. It is also a [...]

You may have seen some of the different websites around for networking. I’m not talking about Facebook or Myspace, which are for social networking. Facebook and Myspace are great for keeping up with friends and sharing more personal details about your non-work life. For scientific networking, you want to be able to connect with people [...]

In my current position, I had the opportunity to hire a new R&D scientist to join the team. I was excited at being able to build my team and take my time to find the perfect fit for our company. My experience in the process of hiring gave me a new perspective on all the [...]

Does your lab have a closet full of white elephants; once expensive instruments that are no longer fit for purpose, or have broken down? In many cases, all of that wasted money and resource could have been saved if the buyers had made smart choices about matching the instrument more closely to their needs. A [...]