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.
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!
Choose a free resource to help you move forward
Checklist
Daily Lab Checklist
This three-phase checklist covers everything you need to do before going home for the day. Cold storage, decontamination, and labelling will never get skipped in the rush again! Split responsibility clearly across first-in, personal, and last-out phases, each with its own sign-off.
This ebook introduces you to some of the most common safety principles that you will encounter every time you step into a laboratory. On top of that, it will help point you towards additional resources to answer your questions when deeper questions arise.
You made it to the end—nice work! If you’re the kind of scientist who likes figuring things out without wasting half a day on trial and error, you’ll love our newsletter. Get 3 quick reads a week, packed with hard-won lab wisdom. Join FREE here.
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…
I’ve recently been lyophilizing biological extracts. While I was preparing for the experiment, I became interested in the number of methods available for drying, concentrating, and storing samples: freezing, freeze-drying, rotary evaporation, centrifugal evaporation, and blow-down drying. Here is a brief description of each technique for biological sample storage to provide clarity and explain how…
Have you ever given thought to how you are disposing of antibiotics in the lab and whether or not it’s correct? Discover the problems associated with improper antibiotic disposal and how to correctly dispose of different antibiotics in the lab.
When developing an assay, whether it is for basic research or for use in diagnostics, you will often be asked about your assay’s sensitivity. This is perhaps one of the most important performance characteristics you can determine for an assay, and in regulated work, such as in vitro diagnostic (IVD) development and clinical diagnostics, it…
Life in the lab is easy-peasy when you are only prepping a handful of tubes. But what if you need to scale up to 10’s or even 100’s of samples? Scaling up your experiments can have some expected and some not-so-expected, leaving you in a lurch, consequences. Read through our tips so you aren’t caught…
Experiments that never seem to end often start with questions that are too open-ended. Learn how to adapt SMART goals to your experimental design, define clear metrics and endpoints, and build research questions that give your work direction, make results easier to interpret, and help your studies reach a meaningful conclusion.
10 Things Every Molecular Biologist Should Know
The eBook with top tips from our Researcher community.
