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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.
In this World of Microbes series, so far we’ve covered the importance of microbes in medicine including their use in vaccines, antibiotics, probiotics and protein production of antibodies for immunotherapy. Now we’ll diverge away from medicine and explore two other important fields where microbes are invaluable – food production and biofuel. Food Production When you…
When you think of microbes what comes to mind? Moldy bread, Penicillin and antibiotics? Vaccines? Fermented food, like yogurt and kombucha? And the latest Probiotics health craze? How about antibody production for immune therapy? Maybe not so much, but you should know that the use of microbes is wide and ever growing. Now researchers are finding…
If you google “What’s hot in medicine,” you will see the word “gut microbiome” popping up in every corner of the webpage. Microbes keep your body functioning in balance – from digesting complex carbohydrates to fighting off foreign pathogens and educating your immune system. They have even been linked to maintaining brain function as well….
I’ve recently been doing some lyophilization of biological extracts. While I was preparing for the experiment, I became interested in the number of different methods there are 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…
In part one, I discussed the ‘how to’ of simply freezing samples and the basics of vacuum evaporation, often referred to as speed vacing. Now, we’ll have a look at two more complex sample storage techniques (at least in terms of equipment) for drying samples (lyophilizaton and rotary evaporation) and the simpler method of blow…
As a protein biochemist where bacteria were mere workhorses, imagine my surprise when I began work in a bonafide micro lab! I discovered that bacteria could be much fussier than my good ol’ cloning and expression friends E. coli DH5ɑ or BL21. One broth would not do for all, some even required blood! No, no,…
The world as we know it couldn’t exist without microbes. It is estimated that there are tens of trillions of bacteria living just in and on humans. (Ewww?) One trillion has 12 zeros. To put that in perspective, the entire human population on earth is only 7.3 billion with a measly 9 zeros. With that many microbes…
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