Lab Statistics & Math
Think You Need Cells to Make Your Protein? Think Again! Use In Vitro Translation.
Do you need purified recombinant protein to test biological drugs? But you don’t have the time or facilities for cell culture and purification? Try using in vitro translation (IVT) instead! IVT is like your own miniature protein factory. And it is great for a wide range of molecular biology applications because IVT can be much…

Analyzing Apoptosis – A Review of Analytical Techniques
Now that we’ve learned about the role of apoptosis in good health and disease, it will be useful to know how we can detect apoptosis in cells or organisms. A variety of apoptosis detection kits are commercially available, and here is a roundup of how they work: TUNEL and DNA damage assays The TUNEL assay…

Beginners Introduction to R Statistical Software
In this webinar you will learn how to import data from Microsoft Excel into R how to use R to perform statistical analyses how get a beautifully formatted figure from your data Summary: This webinar will take the case study approach to introduce R to biologists with little or no previous knowledge of the…

Ten Non-Chemical Lab Hazards and What They Do to You!
Your lab is full of non-chemical hazards that can explode, stab, kill, and – as if that wasn’t enough – bite. Here’s a list of those hazards to remind you why Environmental Health & Safety exists! 1. Centrifuges Centrifuges are dangerous, especially when not cared for! An unmaintained ultracentrifuge imploded in an American lab in…

The Establishment of the Nobel Prize
Let’s play a game. I’ll say a word and you say what comes to your mind. Ready? Go! Cat… Kitchen… Doctor… Airplane… Nobel… I have no idea what you said when I said cat but I’d say most of you said “prize” when I said Nobel. Alfred Nobel’s name is most often remembered because of…

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Making Pretty Plots With ggplot
The thing that was most difficult for me as an R beginner was plotting graphs with error bars – there is no concise way to do this with base graphics. There are workarounds, often using the ‘arrows’ command, but isn’t there a simpler way? Yes, in fact there are a handful of plotting packages for…

R You Ready? Using R for Statistical Tests
We’ve been slowly coaxing you along in our R tutorials. We’ve introduced what R is, gave you a basic tutorial into how to use R and also spent some time learning how to explore your data with R. By now you are probably itching to use R for more complicated analyses. To indulge you, I…

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Exploratory Data Analysis
As you’ve probably kind of guessed from our previous articles Introducng R and the Basic R Tutorial, we think R programming language and R-studio are great tools for data analysis and figure production. And now we are about to prove it! So, you’ve collected some data and are pretty sure you know what statistical test…

You did a Co-IP…now what?
You spent the last few weeks tweaking your Co-immunoprecipitation conditions, testing different antibody/bead combinations, and sampling a panaply of solutions and FINALLY! You have your Co-immunoprecipitation (Co-IP) elution… Now what? Well, you have a few choices. It really all depends on what you need know about the proteins in your elution. Do you need to identify…
Read MoreLet’s Talk About Stats: Getting the Most out of your Multiple Datasets with Post-hoc Testing
So you’ve performed a test such as an ANOVA and have found that there is statistical significance in your data (lucky you!), however you now want to know where that significance lies. When you are comparing multiple sets of data it might seem like a logical thought to simply perform an individual t-test between each…

Let’s Talk About Stats: Comparing Multiple Datasets
Last week I focused on the left-hand side of this diagram and talked about statistical tests for comparing only two datasets. Unfortunately, many experiments are more complicated and have three or more datasets. Different statistical tests are used for comparing multiple data sets. Today I will focus on the right side of the diagram and…

Let’s Talk About Stats: Comparing Two Sets of Data
There are so may statistical tests out there it can be difficult to determine which is the right test to use. Below is a simple diagram to help you quickly determine which test is right for you. Although this is by no means a comprehensive guide, it includes some of the most common tests and…

Let’s Talk About Stats: Understanding the Lingo
The first hurdle in learning about statistics is the language. It’s terrible to be reading about a particular statistical test and have to be looking up the meaning of every third word. The type of data you have, the number of measurements, the range of your data values and how your data cluster are all…

How to Deal With a Failed Experiment
Scientific success is often defined by how well your experiments progress and the results you produce. However, scientific research is driven by a curiosity about the unknown, and you cannot always be prepared for the unknown. Inevitably there will come a time when your experiments fail. In this article I give you some of the…

Beneath the Lab Coat Part 2: What is lurking under our readers’ lab coats?
Recently, we wrote an article highlighting the prevalence of science-themed tattoos among scientists, and the particular significance these tattoos have among those who choose to get them (https://bitesizebio.com/articles/beneath-the-lab-coat-why-do-scientists-get-inked/). As a follow-up, we reached out to our readers to collect images and stories about their unique, science-themed tattoos. Some of you were kind enough to share…

Internships During Graduate School: How to Start a Side Career Without Quitting Your Day Job
The clock strikes 10:00 pm, your thumb has a raging case of carpal tunnel syndrome, the trash is full of tubes containing unsuccessful PCR reactions, and you wonder…Is this really what I want to do with my life? How do you get your mojo back when you’re knee deep in research? One option to consider…

The Ten Lab Commandments: Or the Guide to a Happy Lab
I was lucky enough to do my PhD in an extremely friendly and well-organised lab. In my opinion, these two key traits are required for a successful research experience. This environment, while appearing effortless, was due in part to the hard work of the senior postdoc who kept the lab, and all of us, in…

A Guide for Solving Your Lab Math Problems
Math is an important part of lab life, from making solutions to calculating protein concentrations, and miscalculations can cause mayhem for your experiments. Therefore it is important that your math is right, or you could spend weeks trying to figure out what’s going wrong in your experiments. I was hopeless at remembering how to do…

Show Us Your Moves: Making an MSD Plot
In the previous article, I showed you how to interpret mean-squared displacement (MSD) and showed four easy things you can learn from an MSD graph at a quick glance. Now let’s turn from analyzing an MSD plot to making one. I am going to use the programming language R to generate simulated data and then…

How Does it Move? Interpreting Motion of an Object with the Mean-Squared Displacement
Stuff moves. It is useful to study how stuff moves, because motion analysis can tell us a lot about the object that is moving. For example, we can learn if an object’s motion is aimless, diffusive wandering, or directed towards some goal, free to explore the available environment, or restricted to a confined space. Studying…
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