The Multi-skilled Scientist: Key Skills for All Scientists to Master

The Multi-skilled Scientist: Key Skills for All Scientists to Master

Although bench work is an integral part of becoming a successful scientist, it is by no means the only part of it. It is often the uncredited skill set possessed by many seasoned scientists that make them so valuable to employers and to further research. In this article I will highlight the less obvious skills…

The Five Essentials of Organizing Laboratory Samples

The Five Essentials of Organizing Laboratory Samples

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…

How to Minimize Variation and Achieve Reproducibility

How to Minimize Variation and Achieve Reproducibility

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…

Let’s Dish About Soaps: A General Overview of Detergents

Let’s Dish About Soaps: A General Overview of Detergents

What do cell lysis, clean dishes, and gallbladders all have in common? Answer: detergents! These useful chemicals can solubilize fats and other proteins in water. They are the key to applications as varied as lysing cell membranes, extracting DNA, and solubilizing proteins for gel electrophoresis. To help you understand these important chemicals, we provide a…

Heating up agar? Just add a cup of water and avoid the glitter and crumbs

Heating up agar? Just add a cup of water and avoid the glitter and crumbs

It’s ironic how much folklore and superstition comes with being in science. “That’s a lucky pipette”, “playing Bach for your cells will help them grow”, “always make your own solutions”; we all have our own tips. Some of them might be well-founded others not so much… Tips from trusted colleagues can be very helpful though….

Facing Your Laboratory Freezer: Dos and Don’ts For Defrosting Day

Facing Your Laboratory Freezer: Dos and Don’ts For Defrosting Day

Your stomach clenches. Sweat snakes down your torso. The world seems to slow down. You begin the long, terrifying walk down the corridor. Your mind calls out to you to, “Run! Run now!” but you soldier on until you reach the door and knock. There is no escaping the wrath you will evoke when you…

Agarose versus Polyacrylamide: Not All Gels Are Created Equal

Agarose versus Polyacrylamide: Not All Gels Are Created Equal

Like athletes running on turf versus sand, the gel you run your DNA through can highly affect your results. The two main types of gels that people use for DNA electrophoresis are agarose and polyacrylamide (PA) gels, but figuring out the differences can be confusing. Basically, you choose a gel based on two main factors:…

Gel Electro-For-Whatsit?  Breaking Down How Gel Electrophoresis Works

Gel Electro-For-Whatsit? Breaking Down How Gel Electrophoresis Works

Run to red!  It’s a mantra I learned when first using gel electrophoresis to separate DNA molecules.  This can save you a lot of frustration and humiliation in the lab (stage right: a complaining scientist who swears the equipment is broken as a supervisor facepalms in embarrassment). But what about how does this jell-o like…

freeze thaw dog, plasmon resonance implications

Freeze-Thaw Cycles and Why We Shouldn’t Do It

Freeze-thaw—you know it’s bad for your samples, don’t you? While working in the lab, you have most likely heard someone say ‘aliquot your protein/cells/DNA/RNA to avoid too many freeze-thaw cycles.’ But do you actually understand why? You probably thought that avoiding freeze-thaw cycles had something to do with damaging cell structure as well as proteins…

What Makes a “Good” Laboratory Buffer?

Just about any molecular biology experiment will involve the action of enzymes or other active proteins. And when enzymes are involved, the pH of your experimental environment is going to change. This is because most enzymatic reactions involve the loss or gain of hydrogen ions (protons), which modifies the pH of the environment. Biological systems…

A Quick Primer on Enzyme Kinetics

A Quick Primer on Enzyme Kinetics

As biological catalysts, enzymes transform target substrates into products. Enzyme kinetics is the rate of that transformation. By understanding how an enzyme’s behavior is affected, you can figure out how it functions in physiology or fails to function in disease. Now it gets complicated… What Affects an Enzyme’s Kinetics? In the first place, most enzymes…