Posts Tagged ‘Lab Hacks’
Tips for Using and Maintaining Your Laboratory’s Freeze Dryer
Keep your lab’s freeze dryer running smoothly with our expert tips on care and maintenance, including oil changes and vacuum leak fixes.
Read MoreWhat Reagents Can You Use Past Their Chemical Expiry Date?
Learn about what reagents are usable past their chemical expiry date, how can you check if they are still okay, and which ones you should throw out.
Read MoreHow to Keep Your Centrifuge Alive: 5 Easy Tips
The more expensive your lab centrifuge, the more sensitive and the easier it is to break. What can we do to give these pricey monsters a long, successful tenure in the lab? Read our 5 easy tips.
Read More8 Steps to More Successful Experiments
Performing successful experiments is a crucial skill for scientists. We’ve rounded up our top tips to help you achieve perfect procedures!
Read MoreLab Hacks: Tips to Save You Money and Time
Not every lab has the cash to shell out on fancy equipment. We share some trusty lab hacks and welcome you to share your own with us.
Read More“Viable But Non-Culturable (VBNC)”: Zombies of the Bacterial World
Imagine that you want to test the efficiency of an antimicrobial treatment in inhibiting a certain bacterial pathogen. As part of the experiment, you expose the bacteria to the treatment and monitor the cultivability of the microorganism by counting the number of colony forming units (CFU) formed on culture media. If the microorganism is sensitive…
Read More8 Tricks to Improve Your Negative Staining of Membrane Proteins
Negative staining of proteins is a versatile tool for structural biology. The sample preparation protocol is simple: the sample is embedded in a heavy metal stain that gives rise to increased specimen contrast. Thus, negative staining is a very convenient method to assess sample homogeneity, formation of macromolecular complexes, or quality of protein preparation. Conventional…
Read MoreLab Aches and How to Avoid Them
Pipetting all day? Scrolling and scrolling through Excel columns trying to make sense of your data? Spending hours at the microscope because your boss wants Nature-worthy pictures? It’s not uncommon that performing lab work forces you into unhealthy postures, and after a day at work your spine begs for mercy. How Your Posture Suffers on…
Read More4 Important Considerations for Your Cell Lysis
You’ve cultured your cells and completed your treatments, now it’s time to harvest them and proceed to the downstream effects. Cell lysis is the crucial stage that determines if your experiment has a chance of producing the data that you have been waiting for. Part of the starting biological material is inevitably lost on each…
Read MoreTen Tips for Pipetting the 384-Well Plate
I was so excited to start using 384-well plates for my assays. With so many wells, these plates are useful for testing many conditions in parallel, as required in ELISAs, siRNA library screens, and drug treatment dilutions. However, I quickly learned that pipetting in these plates is more complicated than I thought. This article contains…
Read MoreNeed a Few More Hours in the Day? Here Are Some Timesaving Tips
Are you constantly looking for ways to squeeze more lab hours out of the day? Here are some timesaving tips that can help. Figure out Where Your Time Goes Not sure where you are losing those valuable hours? Use a website like Toggl to help you keep track of your time. This will make it…
Read MoreDon’t Let Bubbles Burst Your Experimental Excitement
Bubbles isn’t just the name of my favorite cartoon character from Power Puff girls, or just the best activity for a kid to play with, in general. In my adult world, they stand for a whole lot more, but can still cause extreme emotions. At the lab bench, seeing bubbles brings happiness or sadness depending…
Read MoreWater your choices? Understanding Types of Water in the Lab
If you are working in a scientific laboratory, it is very important to be aware of the various types of water available, because the purity may not be acceptable for your specific experimental application. In most labs, there are generally two types of water piped in to the sinks: Industrial Water Industrial water is non-potable…
Read MoreRunning your Lab on a Shoestring Budget
It is never too late to take proactive measures to protect your research budget in the event of a funding lapse.
Read MoreOutsourcing Research: Should Your Experiment Spend Some Time Away from You?
As a researcher, it’s satisfying to manage your own projects and do the bench work yourself. After all, if you don’t have experience with a technique, you’re usually expected to figure it out (with or without direct supervision). In some situations, dealing with difficult molecular techniques is simply part of the job description. The scientific…
Read MoreThree Steps for Setting up a Drug Screening Assay
An anti-cancer drug or antibody drug conjugate (ADC) screening assay is the first step to establish the utility of a drug candidate in killing cancer cells. Nevertheless, these assays are time consuming and tedious. The purpose of this article is to make things easier when you are required to set up these in vitro screening…
Read MoreOptimize Bacterial Protein Expression by Considering these 4 Variables
So, you have successfully cloned your gene of interest and are eager to purify buckets of protein. No matter your eventual application—kinetic experiments using a SPR instrument, structural analysis using X-ray crystallography, or any other experiment—you’ll need to express your protein first. Now, it’s time to put your expression plasmid into E. coli and get…
Read MoreMaking the Most of Quiet Days in the Lab: From Gloomy to Glorious
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…
Read MoreFour Tips for Working with Human Clinical Samples
While using human clinical samples in your research can provide robust and heterogeneous results applicable to larger portions of the population, working with these samples presents its own set of challenges. Here are some tricks I have learned to help isolate and grow your cells of interest while eliminating stromal, blood, or other undesired contaminants.…
Read MoreSDS-PAGE Tips and Tricks to Save You Time
Speed up your SDS-PAGE with our time-saving tips and tricks!
Read MoreSPUD’s Your Bud When it Comes to Sensitive qPCR
There’s piloting a brand new technique for the first time. Then, there’s jumping through hoops trying to get an established lab technique to work. The former, in contrast to the latter, is expected to be fraught with hardships. Yet troubleshooting an old lab technique that isn’t working anymore, is frustrating at a whole new level.…
Read MoreHow to Shut Off Background Lac Expression in LB
Here’s a tip that you may find useful if you are expressing proteins in E.coli using a lac promoter-based expression system, e.g. pET, in LB medium (L-broth). Lac expression systems are typically induced in the lab using IPTG (isopropyl-beta-D-thiogalacto- pyranoside), which is a non- hydrolyzable analog of lactose, the natural inducer of the lac operon.…
Read More5 Tips on Vector Preparation for Gene Cloning
One of the most crucial steps in any cloning procedure is the preparation of the vector. Get it wrong and your chances of success will be drastically reduced. The overall aim for a good vector preparation is to obtain a fairly concentrated stock of undamaged, fully digested plasmid DNA that is free from contaminants. Missing…
Read MorePCR Problems? Try an Additive
You’ve tried all the usual stuff, and checked the primer sequences twice, but still can’t get that PCR fragment amplified. It’s time to enter the strange world of PCR additives. Over the years a variety of additives have been shown to enhance PCR reactions in certain situations. Here is a summary of some of the…
Read MoreHow To Make Your Own ECL
ECL can be an expensive reagent in a lab. Why not make your own? Hopefully, this quick, simple and cheap solution will be of help to you!
Read MoreFaster, Even Cooler DNA Gels!
When I began a master’s program in 2008, the lab task I hated more than anything was running agarose gels for DNA. Something so simple, ubiquitous, and necessary gobbled up more hours in the lab than I care to remember. Even though we added the DNA stain directly to the molten agarose and didn’t have…
Read MoreDefeat RNAse Contamination Using Bleach in Your RNA Agarose Gel
So, you’ve extracted your precious RNA and want to check its quality on a gel. Conventionally, you would run a formaldehyde gel, which is messy and requires a lot of prep. Plus, it is a huge undertaking in terms of time (and money) if all you want to do is just check the quality of…
Read MoreHow to Start Using Coding to Automate Image Analysis Part 2: Batch Processing Multiple Images
In Part 1 of this article, I introduced you to using code for basic image manipulation in ImageJ and working with the command recorder to expand your coding vocabulary. I covered how to make a simple macro, how to edit it and then save it to be run again another time. If you skipped the…
Read MoreMicrobiology 101 by Aunt Yersinia
We are pleased to announce that the famous maid of microbiology, dear old Aunt Yersinia, has agreed to start writing a microbiology and molecular biology advice column for Bitesize Bio. She will be free to answer your most pressing questions sent to: auntyersinia@bitesizebio.com By way of introduction, Aunt Yersinia is bestowing 8 spores of knowledge garnered…
Read MoreTips for Heating up Agar in the Microwave
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…
Read MoreBlast your way to quicker, cheaper bacterial transformations
If you want a more efficient, cheaper way to do bacterial transformation, you are definitely going to like this article.
Read MoreMolecular Cooking: How to Apply Science in the Kitchen
Rumour has it that many people who work in a lab enjoy cooking. And, when asked by a non-biologist family member how they spend their days in the laboratory, molecular biologists might answer that doing experiments is similar to cooking. Apart from the organisational parallels that can be drawn between following a protocol and a…
Read MorePimp your Microcentrifuge
Microcentrifuges are pretty much the epitome of efficiency, but I have a couple of suggestions that may make using this instrument even easier. Divide by Three Not only is the number of tubes a microcentrifuge can hold divisible by two, but almost always by three as well. How does this help you? If you have…
Read MoreLab Stuff I wish I could use in my kitchen
We recently had a feature from Jode on everyday equipment that you can use in the lab, but what about the other way around? Do you ever take a look at what you’re doing in the lab and think, “Wow, this would really come in handy at home?” Here are a few of the things…
Read MoreHow to Build a Plate Centrifuge for $25
Find out how to build a plate centrifuge using a salad spinner. Gathering the components is as complicated as it gets!
Read MoreLab Hacks: Lab equipment from the hardware store
While almost every lab has a small toolbox with some screwdrivers, pliers, and such, here are some tools that may not have obvious utility at the bench, but could make your life easier. A Butane Torch If your OCD is as bad as mine, then watching a bubble flow out of the flask onto the…
Read MoreLow-Tech Lab Gadgets and Solutions: My All-Time Faves
Looking for cheaper or faster solutions in the lab? Here’s our top 10 list of ways to use everyday items to make gadgets and for low-tech solutions for the lab.
Read MoreQuick and Dirty Screening for Cloned Inserts
For identifying positive clones from a plasmid cloning procedure, the routine of performing a mini-prep and then checking the putative clones by restriction digestion is most commonly used. Of course, if you need to screen a large number of clones, another option is a colony PCR to identify positives, followed by restriction digests to confirm.…
Read MoreFast restriction digests?
In the old days, restriction digests were a great excuse for long lunch breaks. Come back 1-2 hours later and it’s done. But, just to ruin our fun, Fermentas then NEB started to offer ranges of restriction enzymes that do their job in 5 minutes. Nothing changed with these enzymes – someone just figured out…
Read MoreLow cost DNA gel documentation
Get awesome pictures of your DNA gels with a standard digital camera and an orange filter. Here’s how.
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