Very often plasmid maps, especially historical ones that are hand-drawn by a long-forgotten PhD student, are a puzzle. What are these arrows and boxes? Where do I start? Don’t worry, we have a crash course introduction into deciphering plasmid maps. Familiarizing Yourself with Your Plasmid of Interest Let’s start with a classic plasmid: pBR3221. It…

Cleaning the lab is one of the hardest jobs because it’s dull and repetitive. However, nobody in their sound scientific mind would argue that this can be avoided. Dust accumulates bugs, bacteriophages, and RNAses that can stray into your experiment and ruin it. Old boxes piling up is a fire hazard. Anybody who refuses to…

Long before “Alexa” was a household name, Alexa dyes were an established series of fluorescent dyes. The inventor Richard Paul Haugland named the dyes after his son Alex. Originally a trademark of Molecular Probes, the Alexa family is now a part of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Alexa dyes are frequently used as labels in fluorescence microscopy,…