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Search below to delve into the Bitesize Bio archive. Here, you’ll find over two decades of the best articles, live events, podcasts, and resources, created by real experts and passionate mentors, to help you improve as a bioscientist. Whether you’re looking to learn something new or dig deep into a topic, you’ll find trustworthy, human-crafted content that’s ready to inspire and guide you.
AI in science can draft your discussion section, summarise forty papers and even propose novel hypotheses. So are you becoming less essential to your own work? The real risk to your job isn’t replacement, but letting polished output go unexamined. Here’s the one question that keeps your judgment, expertise and ownership firmly yours.
A chromatogram in a report and a chromatogram in Empower™ look identical, but only one can be interrogated. This article outlines four placement decisions for your critical review items, plus how to build the list, document the workflow, and test whether it actually detects anything.
Onboarding Empower™ Users is most effective when training focuses first on core terminology, compliance, and daily workflows using your lab’s real data. Teaching less initially builds a solid foundation, enabling quicker, confident analyst independence. Competence, not time, should guide when to expand training to advanced topics.
Most Empower™ labs have trained their analysts and written their SOPs, but still see inconsistent workflows, recurring mistakes, and the same go-to experts fielding every unusual situation. The reason is almost always the same: what gets taught is where to click, not why decisions matter or how to troubleshoot when workflows break down. Here’s how you can build competence more effectively.
Making the jump from Word to LaTeX to prepare your scientific documents involves a steep learning curve. We’ve made the transition easier by collating the basic commands you need to know to format text in LaTeX, including bold, underlined, and italicized text, and creating itemized lists.
As biological datasets get larger and larger, more biologists are turning to cloud computing for their storage and analysis. This article explores the advantages of cloud computing for biology and lists some online services you can use for your projects.
LaTeX is a powerful document preparation system that can give you beautifully typeset documents. But getting started using it isn’t the most intuitive process. This beginner’s guide gives you easy instructions on LaTeX document setup, layout, and how to deal with common syntax errors.
Get a short introduction to AI including key terminology, example applications of artificial intelligence in biology, and resources to help you get started.
Discover how to easily draw proteins and nucleic acids using molecular visualization tools with our step-by-step tutorial.
Rounding off our series of tips for writing your thesis in Microsoft Word, the final post covers page numbering, shortcut tips, and cover pages.
The end is in sight! You’ve drafted your individual thesis chapters and now it’s time to combine them into a single thesis master document. Follow our easy step-by-step instructions to get your thesis submission-ready.
Our latest tips for thesis writing with Word highlight three useful tools that can help you effortlessly create an easily navigatable thesis using built-in Word tools.
Get your thesis writing off to a great start by learning how to create a thesis outline in Microsoft Word.
Automate almost everything by learning Python. Discover why Python is a useful language for Biologists and discover how you can teach yourself!
DOIs got you confused? Find out what they are and how to use them.
Here we take you through 7 of the best science software apps that can save you time and money!
So, you’ve slaved away in the lab for months and now you’re ready to create your first figure –whether it’s for a thesis or a journal – way to go you! Now you could always use Word or PowerPoint to compile your first image, but don’t – ever do that! (And if you plan to…
Have you ever entertained the idea of learning to program? Have you tried but felt discouraged by the overwhelming amount of information out there? If you answered yes to both of those questions, I encourage you to try again with the following resources. Computer science is one of the best subjects to self learn. …
Pat yourself on the back, you saw a post with the word “coding” in the title and you didn’t freak out or glaze over. That’s the first step. Coding seems to have such a stigma attached to it; people tend to think that it’s incomprehensible nonsense that they could never learn, and that it has…
BLAST is the most popular bioinformatics online tool. But in order to properly use it, you have to understand that is not just a search query against a database but something far more complicated, and the information you get back far more…precious!
Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) remains the cornerstone of biological sequence analysis. When users have one or few queries, the data are easy to interpret based on the graphical output that the search provides. However, when you have to analyze hundreds or a few thousand queries, running graphical outputs can be computationally intensive, difficult…
Last time we brushed up on cell referencing and constructing formulae to use Excel for some basic and some slightly more advanced calculations. This time we’re going to move on to using some built-in Excel functions and go through how to apply all that we’ve done so far to a worked example that is relevant…
Microsoft Excel can be a really powerful, useful tool for certain kinds of data processing and record keeping, and the chances are you probably don’t even know how to use half of the functions it comes with! That’s OK, personally, I find Excel a bit less user-friendly than Word, but also it’s a programme I…
One of the best parts of R is how extensible it is. Over the years, the community has put together hundreds (thousands?) of amazing packages to make your workflow easier. The downside of this wealth is that it can be hard to find packages that do exactly what you want! Therefore, I’ve put together a…
More than a pun on the explosive growth of sequencing data, BLAST makes annotation and comparisons of similar sequences much easier. Created by a group at the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information in 1991, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool is arguably the most heavily used tool for sequence analysis (that’s available for free,…
What did we do before the internet? And where would we be without handy online molecular biology tools? Apparently in the ‘olden days’ doing a simple gene or protein alignment required programs that used dynamic programming algorithms such as the Needleman-Wunsch and Smith-Waterman algorithms. These required long processing times and the use of supercomputers or…
After Peter’s Introduction to Linux, those of you brave enough to accept the challenge will now have Linux installed on your machine so today I want to highlight to you some of the wonderful free software that is available for biologists using Linux. Before I start, I should mention that virtually all tools of modern…
In recognition of a fresh new year and a fresh new direction for Bitesize Bio, I thought I’d start my tenure as the Bioinformatics “guru” by introducing you to a handful of websites that will help you locate established as well as fresh new and (mostly) free online molecular biology and bioinformatics databases and tools….
I’ve put together this list of 7 free molecular biology software tools for Macs. I hope you will find at least some of it useful. If any of your favorite free programs are not included, please email me and I’ll add them or you can leave a comment with a link. If you are a…
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