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Andrew has been a freelance life science writer for more than 20 years. Worked for academic institutions, startup biotechs, major biopharmaceuticals. Agriculture editor, Genetic Literacy Project. He has an MS in Biotechnology from the University of Maryland, and a BA in Physical Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.
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The word ‘retrovirus’ evokes images of HIV, the AIDS pandemic and a desperate worldwide effort to defeat this mighty adversary. But on the flip side, scientific research has managed to tame the virus and use it as a tool for advancement. Retroviruses are commonly used to introduce genes into mammalian cells to express or knockdown…
What do DNA mini preps and protein immunoprecipitation experiments have in common? They start differently, but they end with the same, critical stage – elution. But what exactly is elution, and what is the point? The Terminology First, let’s start with some basic terminology: Elution – extracting one material from another by washing with a…
You have probably run a standard agarose gel hundreds of times. They are great for visualizing small DNA fragments up to 10 kb, but what if you want to examine really large pieces of DNA or even whole chromosomes? This is where pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) comes in! While the equipment required to run…
The stability of an antibiotic depends on its chemical structure, method of isolation (from natural sources or chemical synthesis), and the mechanisms of inactivation. First generation antibiotics isolated from natural sources, such as penicillin, are the most unstable, followed by its semisynthetic derivatives (such as ampicillin and carboxycylin). Aminoglycosides (kanamicin, spectinomycin, etc.) are more stable….
Plasmid mapping and DNA annotation software is pretty abundant these days. A quick Google search brings up dozens of hits – but how do you know which one to use? If you are like most molecular biologists, you probably use the same software your colleagues do—usually it is either the stuff that gets passed down…
Whatever molecular biology techniques you use, at some point you will have to clean up your DNA samples to remove things like buffers, contaminants and nucleotides from you precious sample, so that you have perfectly pure DNA for your downstream experiments. Magnetic beads are one DNA cleanup option. They are simple and effective—and their reassuringly…
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