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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.
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NGS is not a three-headed monster. However, it can be a difficult concept to grasp—especially when you are getting started. There is a lot of new terminology, and a whole new world to discover: both in the lab bench and in interpreting your results. It helps to start somewhere. So, let’s start! Depth of Coverage…
So, you’ve slaved away in the lab for months and now you’re ready to create your first figure –whether it’s for a thesis or a journal – way to go you! Now you could always use Word or PowerPoint to compile your first image, but don’t – ever do that! (And if you plan to…
Successful western blotting means achieving unambiguous results, and this requires a sensitive and specific antibody-antigen interaction. Consequently, high quality antibodies are critical for reliable and consistent western blotting. Western Blotting Process In the basic western blotting process, polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) separates a mix of proteins according to their molecular weights (denaturing gels) or their…
Your reagents should do ‘Exactly what they say on the tin.’ This only happens though if you look after them in the way the manufacturer states on their data sheets. We have all been guilty of using reagents past their expiration date. Usually we can get away with it, but there are a few things…
In this article, you will be introduced to the world of fluorescent western blotting. Firstly, we will compare fluorescent and chemiluminescent western blotting. Then, we will learn how infrared fluorescent western blotting can give you truly quantitative and reproducible results. Lastly, we’ll look at the many advantages of fluorescent western blotting, including the possibility to multiplex. Importantly,…
Some names are confusing. For example, ant-lion is not an ant – or a lion. Likewise, fermentation in the scientific sense does not involve using a ferment or brewing beer. In science, fermentation is the setting up of a long-term culture of eukaryotic or prokaryotic cells. Fermentation is invaluable in providing a steady flow of…
Red Pill or Blue? Carrying out science often involves many difficult decisions! I see it all the time in RNA protocols – the “gracious” option of using purified water or Tris-EDTA (TE) buffer to dissolve (or elute, if you are using column purification) RNA. When I was trained in assessing RNA using UV spectrophotometry, graduate…
Committee meeting approaching? 10 minute department seminar? Lab meeting? Fear not! My adviser has insulted my presentations so regularly, that I’ve finally learned some things. Hopefully, I can head your adviser off at the pass, and give you some tips on crafting an incredible talk. What’s the Occasion? Who’s Your Audience? This is arguably the most important…
Droplet digital PCR? It’s easy. Because we’re here to guide you through it. We recently introduced you to the principles of digital PCR technology and how it differs from qPCR. In a nutshell, digital PCR is an end-point PCR technology that divides a single PCR into a large number of partitions, and then perform PCR…
Quantitative Reverse transcription PCR (RT-qPCR) is frequently used in the lab to detect and quantify RNA expression in a sample. The first step of the assay is to convert the labile RNA to its complementary DNA (cDNA) counterpart through reverse transcription (RT). In fact, RT is the first step in a variety of molecular biology…
We all know that genes encode proteins that make up a living cell. However, the level and coordination of gene expression is really the key to the success of a living cell. One way eukaryotic cells (that’s us!) control protein expression is through addition of a methyl or hydroxymethyl group on the cytosine nucleotide. This…
Imagine being a PhD student whose life mostly revolves around the lab until you are hit by the worst news of your life. You have just lost one or both of your parents and bereavement sets in. You still cannot really believe it, spend your nights crying, and find yourself grappling with a whole pile…
Want to know whether a lead molecule or a ligand of your choice interacts with a particular protein or a receptor? Do you want this information at your fingertips? All it takes is just a few clicks and key presses on the computer and then out comes a computational prediction. This computational process is also…
Have RNA-seq or microarray data? What possible tools can help you find your genes of interest? Is there any pattern in your expression data? I know you are totally at sea but heat maps are now commonly used to help. A heat map is a well-received approach to illustrate gene expression data. It is an…
What Are Quantum Dots? Quantum dots were discovered in the early 1980s. However, it was not until the late 1990s that their use in biological applications was suggested.1 Quantum dots are semiconducting nanocrystals made of artificial atom clusters. Their size generally ranges from 2 to 20 nm. Size is crucial for their physical properties because…
Discover a way to study the active form of proteases in situ with in situ zymography. Read this article to get up to speed.
Titering Phage – The Plaque Assay Phage display is a molecular technique used to isolate binding or interaction partners to molecules of interest from an extensive library. Such libraries are often derived from the variable regions of native B-cell antibody-binding genes cloned into phage DNA. A single round of phage display panning involves many important steps. However, the…
The cell cycle has been very well documented over the years because of its dysregulation in diseases such as cancer. Many different processes contribute to cell growth and replication, which is ultimately controlled by a series of tightly controlled cell cycle phases. For some areas of research, especially within drug discovery and cancer research, cell synchronization in…
It is currently possible to analyze thousands of proteins in a single sample using mass spectrometry (MS) and a database of predicted protein sequences, referred to as ‘bottom-up’ proteomics. With this technology, you can measure protein levels and interactions. Also, you can examine changes in post-translational modifications (PTMs) and isoforms (in an unbiased manner). Working with…
Read up on the various methods for delivering CRISPR reagents and how to choose between them.
Gene reporters enable valuable insight into gene expression. The GUS gene reporter system is one of the popular and common plant reporter systems. GUS, is short for glucuronidase, an enzyme in the bacterium E. coli. GUS is a good reporter for plants, as it does not occur naturally, and thus, has a low background. With…
If you have worked in a lab before, you probably think you are prepared to work anywhere. You’ve done the safety classes, know how to store the chemicals, even know how to work the chemical shower. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fully prepare you for greenhouse work. Greenhouses are a different kind of greenery-filled animal entirely, and…
Cell counting is the bane of existence of many researchers. Countless hours spent in front of the microscope with a haemocytometer on the stand and a manual tally (or “clicker”) in hand can be really daunting. Not to mention that no one will ever double check your count if you don’t take a picture. Those…
Your DNA sequence can be put to good use fairly easily with Blast and Mega software. These programs can help in phylogenetic tree construction. You can ask questions like what is the evolutionary relationship between a set of sequences from different species? Or how have certain microbial strains arisen? Blast As any bioscientist probably knows,…
When working very closely with a team of people in the lab, you will have disagreements leading to conflict. That’s just human nature, hence the origin of a common phrase, “Can’t we all just get along?” If you are lucky, you will be able to resolve the conflict. But then the question becomes, how will this…
There are many different methods and protocols on making your PCR run more efficiently. I recently came across an interesting PCR method called “nanoparticle” PCR. This method seems to attract a lot of attention, because it enhances a PCR by a few orders of magnitude. More interestingly, while the enhancement effect has been reported in a…
A routine task in the lab is to investigate the presence of your favorite protein in a range of histological samples. No doubt, staining your tissue sections using good old immunohistochemistry (IHC) would be your first choice. You just got to love a technique that has celebrated its 70th birthday, and is still used in…
This article is not for the die-hard old-school gel runners. You know who you are, the purists, the “I always make my own gels and buffers from scratch” kind. For you we have lots of articles about PAGE gels, both bis-tris and the standard SDS PAGE kind. Instead this article is for the rest of…
Have you ever wondered how to make professional, easy-to-understand figures of molecules for presentations or publications? While several programs exist for this purpose, ChemDraw is like the Swiss Army knife of chemical sketching programs that most chemists and journals use to prepare figures. Beyond the ability to create chemically accurate and legible figures, ChemDraw can…
You have a nicely baked research project, all set and ready to tempt the world. Then comes an afterthought. It needs some spice, decoration, and even more. As a young or mature scientist your work is often confined to a niche area, riddled with scientific jargon, and confined to intellectual circles. In the 21st century…
Ah, cell counting — it’s the oldest trick in the book! Well, not really, but people have been developing methods for counting cells since the late 1800s. It has been around for a while. But what different methodologies are available to biologists now? Well, hold on, because you’re in for a treat! In this article, we…
Animal models have helped make enormous discoveries and breakthroughs in the last few decades. From Pasteur’s use of sheep to test the ‘Germ Theory’, Pavlov’s classic conditioning experiments in dogs, to Dolly the first cloned mammal, animal research has come a long way. Today, most drugs, vaccines and other pharmaceutical products for medical use are…
Sometimes you know a project is going to be a pain before you even start it. For me, that is whenever I need to clone large (> 3 kb) or complex (e.g., a sequence with repeats) DNA fragments. Long and complex DNA fragments are more likely to create challenges during cloning. Such projects require extra care in just about…
New ways to perform PCR emerge all the time. This speaks for the speed of technological advances, and reflects the ongoing need to keep up with fast-moving research. We all know that PCR’s main purpose is to amplify a stretch of nucleic acids based on sequence-specific primers. Nowadays, a wide range of PCR techniques exist,…
A lot of grad students have probably seen this blog post on the development of science and had a good laugh about it. Long story short, if you imagine that all of human knowledge is a circle, the specialized research that you do is just a small part of the circle. When you contribute to your…
The ubiquitin-proteasome system was discovered at the start of the 1980s, and people have been studying it ever since. Initially, researchers thought that tagging a protein with ubiquitin was the cell’s signal for the protein to be scrapped via the proteasome. But more research has shown that, as with all biology, once you’re up close and…
A flow cytometer collects the events you are interested in, and also ‘sees’ every event that goes through. This includes debris and even bits in your buffers. As cytometrists, we gate our cells to exclude unwanted bits and to focus on the sub-populations that we are interested in studying. There are two main ways of gating…
Advocating for the research that scientists perform is important. Your advocacy helps politicians and the general public understand why funding is needed. In fact, many funding agencies require a disease to be associated with the research, because citizens and politicians do not typically care to fund projects unless they foresee a cure or treatment. Scientific advocacy…
I know what you are thinking, everything is made of cells, so how different can DNA extractions be in plants? The answer is… sort-of different. The overall concept is the same. Cell membranes are lysed, DNA is separated from other cell materials, washed a few times, and then resuspended in water or Tris-EDTA buffer (aka…
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