Bioscience Mastery
The Happy Scientist presents The Art of Going Slow
The Happy Scientist presents The Art of Going Slow Nick Oswald Kenneth Vogt While Bitesize Bio has always been your favorite mentor in the lab, and we have also helped you with soft skills to enhance your career, we realized something was missing. That’s why we are now sponsoring a webinar series called The Happy…
Read More Scientists Working from Home – Practicalities and Wellbeing
Scientists Working from Home – Practicalities and Wellbeing Nick Oswald Kenneth Vogt Laura Grassie In this webinar you will learn: Further perspectives and strategies for effective home working, from Bitesize Bio staff who have being doing so for years Ideas on maintaining productivity and focus Advice on looking after your mental and physical wellbeing during…
Read More Out With the Old: New PubMed Search Tips
PubMed has had a makeover. Find out where your favorite features have moved to and what’s changed in this shiny new version.
Read More Share Your Samples at a Reagent Repository
Have you got a plasmid that others are begging to use? Perhaps your cell line is in high demand? We’ll show how using a repository can take the hassle out of sharing your reagents.
Read More 10 Ideas for Researchers Working from Home
Working from home but don’t have a garage lab? We’ve got 10 ideas to keep you productive while you’re working away from the bench.
Read More The Art of Working from Home, for Scientists
The Art of Working from Home, for Scientists Nick Oswald Kenneth Vogt Laura Grassie The current restrictions that are in place due to COVID-19 mean that many scientific researchers will be working from home for some time. Maintaining focus, morale and productivity without a social workplace structure is easier said than done. Working from home…
Read More Talking When Terrified: Tips for a Nervous Presenter
When I was in school, I absolutely hated giving talks. I was a really nervous presenter, my heart would start beating faster, my face would go red, my hands would shake…even my voice would tremble! Since then I’ve made some big breakthroughs, and now I absolutely love giving talks and lectures. Here are my top…
Read More 18+ Ways to Improve your PubMed searches
Do you *really* know what you’re doing when you search for articles in PubMed? Are you familiar with Boolean operators? What does “MeSH” mean to you? Can you locate (and use) the Advanced Search Builder? Have you set up automatic updates with My NCBI? Do you know how PubMed relates to the other NCBI databases?…
Read More How to Read a Scientific Paper Efficiently
Keeping up with the scientific literature in your field of interest is incredibly important. Not only does it keep you informed as to what your competitors have been working on, it will also help shape and guide your experimental plans. But let’s face it, in our results driven world reading new scientific papers often falls…
Read More How to Share Your Lab Protocols and Why It Benefits You
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific research and your results need to be reproducible not only by yourself but also by others, both in and outside of your laboratory. This reproducibility is key for validation of your results as well as to further expand on the knowledge gained during the experiment. In order to accurately…
Read More DIY Centrifugation-Based Purification of cfDNA
There are many reasons you may want to study circulating, cell-free DNA (cfDNA) such as non-invasive prenatal testing to generate a molecular karyotype of an unborn fetus or for use in cancer to detect, diagnose and monitor the disease. Qiagen’s QIAamp circulating nucleic acids extraction kit is consistently cited in the scientific literature as the…
Read More How to Write an Effective Lab Protocol
We’ve all been there. You’re looking to replicate a result you have read in a paper, or maybe even one that has come from someone else in your own lab. But try as you might, you can’t get your head around the less than effective lab protocol that’s been provided. Or, worse still, you are…
Read More How to Organize Your Lab Space for Better Productivity
The physical arrangement of a laboratory can have a strong effect on a bioscientist’s efficiency; those extra steps and seconds of time can really add up! Here is a compilation of tips to help you organize your lab space to minimize inefficiencies and maximize your productivity in the lab. Organize Your Lab Space with Stations…
Read More Get a Grip: Dealing with Sweaty Glove Hands
Gloves protect the skin from the numerous hazards lurking in research labs. There are many varieties and types of gloves available depending upon your need, whether you want protection from chemical hazards, biological hazards or simply preventing surface contamination. However, a very noticeable side effect of using gloves is ‘sweaty glove hands’. Perhaps many of…
Read More The How and Why of Limit of Detection
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…
Read More Tips for Choosing Your Lab Notebook Pen (and Why You Need to Choose Carefully)
Keeping a meticulous lab record of your experiments is a necessity. And it’s drilled into us to back up our computers, including backups stored in different locations to ensure vital records don’t get lost. But how do we protect the hard copy information in our lab books? You may not have given much thought previously…
Read More Use ddRAD-seq to Study Non-Model Organisms
Reduced-representation genome sequencing has been one of the most important advances in the last several years for enabling massively parallel genotyping of organisms for which there is no reference-grade genome assembly. An implementation of the approach known as ddRAD-seq, first conceived in the Hoekstra lab at Harvard, has been widely adopted by the plant and…
Read More How Scientific Researchers Can Write Effective Emails
Have you ever found yourself wondering why your emails don’t get quite the response you expect? Or no response at all? It is very easy to overlook the importance of constructing clear and concise emails that deliver the right message. In this article, we’ll cover key aspects of emails for your purposes as a scientist.…
Read More Struggles of a Life Scientist
Working late nights or weekends in the lab—we’ve all been there. Why isn’t your cell culture considerate enough to get to exponential phase during normal business hours, anyway? Maybe you just need utter peace and quiet while you pipette hundreds of wells worth of stinky beta-mercaptoethanol. Or perhaps you’re using your wealth of microbiology knowledge…
Read More How to Get a Scientific Research Job in the US (If You Are Coming from Elsewhere)
Growing up in Australia, I remember a common phrase: ‘only in America’. Sometimes this was in reference to bizarre cultural events or phenomena but it was generally accepted that the USA was an extraordinary place, where everything was bigger, brighter, and more outrageous. America has fostered a culture of big ideas and innovation, partly because…
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