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Basically, you choose a gel based on two main factors: how high you need the resolution to be and what is in your samples. To make the choice simpler, I made a handy chart describing the differences between them.
*Pulsed field electrophoresis is a technique in which the direction of current flow in the electrophoresis chamber is periodically altered. This allows fractionation of pieces of DNA ranging from 50, 000-5 millon bp.
Use this chart to help you understand the differences between the two gel types and your samples will be running like athletes in no time!
Alkaline lysis is ideal when you need high-purity plasmid DNA for applications like cloning. Boiling lysis is a low-cost alternative suitable for routine screening tasks. However, it generally yields lower-purity DNA and is limited to smaller plasmids. This article breaks down the applications of the two approaches.
The more experienced hands in your lab know that molecular biology is rarely just a journey from A to B. As a result, I’ve constructed this short workflow as an introduction to genomic molecular techniques.
If you look closely, there’s a scenario that plays out frequently in labs across the world: A scientist sits hunched over dry ice searching exhaustedly through frozen boxes for one sample that has disappeared into the abyss. The tube or specimen in question was likely catalogued at some point in time. But, between then and…
Did you know that there are many alternatives to the animal-derived products we use in the lab? Read more for how and why you might want to make the switch.
Detergents are all around us in the lab – and that’s a good thing! Thanks to their chemical structure, detergents can solubilize and interact with many types of molecules, making them vital to research. To show you why detergents are such a good thing for scientists, we’ll go through six examples in molecular biology where…
Ever wonder why your data isn’t the same after repeating an experiment? Well part of science’s beauty lies in the difficulty of achieving reproducibility. Heraclitus first said that no mans steps in the same river twice and the same can be applied to experiments. It is literally impossible to control for everything because the second…
10 Things Every Molecular Biologist Should Know
The eBook with top tips from our Researcher community.