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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.
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…
SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms are on many scientist’s wish list in experimental studies of genomic DNA sequences. Methods to detect SNPs have evolved. Now with the availability of high throughput sequencing methods, also known as next generation sequencing (NGS), SNPs can be identified in the large amounts of DNA sequence that is generated. There…
Mastering basic bacterial culturing practices is a must if you are planning a career in microbiology! Growing bacteria might be one of the easiest things to do as a scientist. Also, as you’ve probably discovered, it’s even easier to do when you’re trying to prevent bacteria from growing where it shouldn’t be!! When we go…
If you are working in a scientific laboratory, it is very important to be aware of the various types of water available, because the purity may not be acceptable for your specific experimental application. In most labs, there are generally two types of water piped in to the sinks: Industrial Water Industrial water is non-potable…
Thousands upon thousands of genetic variants are now associated with every disease and trait you can possibly think of. Such traits range from cancers to blood pressure, intelligence, height, weight… and many more! This is largely because of the advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, the vast majority of genetic loci associated with these traits are…
It is never too late to take proactive measures to protect your research budget in the event of a funding lapse.
Techniques to study entire tissues, such as brain imaging microscopy, provide great insight into the biology of the whole tissue, rather than just individual cells. Taking this one step further is intravital microscopy (IVM); a newer approach for the imaging of living tissues and organs in live animals. A wide variety of organs can be…
ChIP-seq has proved amazing. Through these new techniques, we can obtain big datasets in a matter of days, making our lives in the lab easier and more efficient. ChiP-seq combines chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays with whole genome sequencing. This makes it possible to understand where proteins bind to DNA and epigenetic modifications. Humans are not only their…
Every lab has a culture, a vibe of its own. Nowhere does the distinct character of the lab become most apparent than the way in which the lab chooses to pour agar plates. You may have heard or been told to pour plates at some point in your lab career. These “plates” could be called…
In recent years, three-dimensional (3D) scanning electron microscopy techniques have gained recognition in the biological sciences. In particular, array tomography, serial block face scanning electron microscopy (SBFSEM) and focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIBSEM) (described in Three-Dimensional Scanning Electron Microscopy for Biology) have shown an increase in biological applications, elucidating ultrastructural details of cells…
Grab an overview of CRISPR technology from its roots as a bacterial defense system to how it can be utilized in health and research.
During my first year as a graduate student, one of the earliest pieces of advice that I received from a senior student in the lab was to keep detailed protocols. In fact, she had a folder of her own protocols, all of them extremely detailed and riddled with notes. When she showed me how to…
Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) offers highly efficient, label-free detection for quantifying biomolecular interactions in real-time. Two exciting SPR variants that have sprung up in recent years are SPR for cellular analysis and SPR-mass spectrometry (SPR-MS). SPR for cellular analysis allows you to study how cells attach to different substrates and each other, while SPR-mass spectrometry…
The mere mention of thesis writing causes many students to instantly reach for their panic button. I was no different. I was freaking out about the mere thought of all that writing. However, after successfully preparing and defending my thesis, I learned that the process is just that, a process. Below are 5 points I…
Good quality starting material is king for reverse transcription! Obtaining reliable results in any experiment requires good preparation. We often take reverse transcription for granted, and we don’t always consider that our qPCR might be performing poorly because of problems in that step. Since it’s quite often the reverse transcription reaction itself that causes fuss…
Cryosectioning is difficult when your tissues melt, fold, curl, wrinkle, tear, or crack. Learn how to troubleshoot these pesky cryosectioning problems.
As a researcher, it’s satisfying to manage your own projects and do the bench work yourself. After all, if you don’t have experience with a technique, you’re usually expected to figure it out (with or without direct supervision). In some situations, dealing with difficult molecular techniques is simply part of the job description. The scientific…
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…
If you ever worked in a biology or biochemistry laboratory, you probably already heard about ELISA. You may have even used it. But do you know what’s behind it? And how you can improve it? Let me guide you through the basics of ELISA, and introduce you to my favorite ELISA technique—AlphaLISA. First Things First… So,…
Part of the fun of science is the opportunity to conjure up hypotheses and ways in which to test them. Of course, being scientists, our ideas are highly thought out and logical. We aim to test the hypothesis which we think is the most likely explanation using the available supporting evidence. In addition, it is…
Tissue culture can sometimes seem like a black art. Too careful—your cells go down. Not careful enough—your cells go down. A butterfly flutters its wings in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—your cells go down. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating, and there are times (and I’m speaking from personal experience here) that you’ll end up chucking…
Starting a PhD program is both an exciting time as well and a challenging one… One of the main things that keeps most PhD students up nights, is rethinking their steps in the lab during the day. Did I do that one thing I may not have? Is that one reagent back in the fridge?…
If you have sorted samples or phenotyped cells by surface expression of proteins, you’ve probably wondered how each cell is sorted or phenotyped in a flow cytometer? This question seems trivial, but in reality it took a while for engineers to figure it out. Before I get into today’s topic on “hydrodynamic focusing,” I’ll walk…
Viral vector production is a worthwhile skill that can be made even easier with a few tips and tricks. In general, transfection of multiple plasmids into a producer cell line results in infectious, non-replicative virus. However, it is important to ensure that your vector preparation is efficient, giving your experiments the best chance of success….
You might have come across protein glycosylation before. Somewhere in the recesses of your memory you might even recall reading something about the protein you’re studying being glycosylated, but what does this mean and how do you analyze it? Glycosylated proteins are molecules decorated with sugar groups as they pass through the ER and Golgi…
Keeping up to date with the scientific literature is a large part of the work-load of any researcher. Love it or loathe it, this means of sharing research findings with the larger scientific community is still the way in which most of us inform ourselves of the latest findings in our fields of research, or…
There are several methods you can use to see if your T cells are cytotoxic, but a chromium release assay using radioactive 51chromium (51Cr) is one of the oldest. It gives good results, and is great for labs that can’t afford or don’t have flow cytometry readily available. Here, I will outline a simple method…
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