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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.
This guide on qPCR for dummies explains the key differences between qPCR and traditional PCR, emphasizing the importance of controls, plate design, and DNA preparation. It covers planning your experiment, setting up triplicates, and managing data to ensure accurate and reliable results. With practical tips on dilution and data handling, this article helps beginners confidently prepare for their first qPCR experiment.
In part one, I discussed the ‘how to’ of simply freezing samples and the basics of vacuum evaporation, often referred to as speed vacing. Now, we’ll have a look at two more complex sample storage techniques (at least in terms of equipment) for drying samples (lyophilizaton and rotary evaporation) and the simpler method of blow…
Choosing a PhD topic can be very hard. There are a lot of things to consider from the subject to the supervisor. Here are some tips to help you choose. Find out what you really like This is the first topic because it is the most important. My first advice would be to get some…
You have a new plasmid, now what do you do? You are excited to go further with your project. But before you can move on, you have to confirm the presence of your insert as well as the sequence and orientation of the insert. Is the insert the right size? Most people use restriction enzymes…
Anyone working with laboratory animals has probably realized that simply putting two animals together does not always yield new offspring and reliable continuity of the animal line – unfortunately animal husbandry isn’t that simple! Of course, apart from making sure that the two animals put together are from different genders, there are a lot of…
Before I get into today’s topic, please allow me to digress a bit and start with a few sentences that sum up the polymerase chain reaction (PCR); the grand-daddy of molecular biology. PCR, a method that is at the heart of modern day molecular biology discoveries, is a process that amplifies genetic material through our…
In a previous article, we went over the basic understanding of the inner workings of a flow cytometer. It’s important to grasp the types of measurements that are being made and, perhaps more importantly, what measurements are NOT being made. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to frame this discussion in terms of a classical flow…
Let’s face it, at least once in your lab life you are going to need a favor. You may need to go on vacation, you may be sick or you may just be a little overwhelmed at the bench. At least once, you will need to ask for a little help and someone will surely…
We can, however, use special dyes or engineered proteins to bind to calcium, indicating where in the cell it is. The trick is determining which probe is most suitable to your cells and application.
Having just finished graduate school, I have been given the privilege of nearly unlimited time to reflect (Yay! Unpaid, Boo!). Graduate school was, for me, a juxtaposition of intellectual growth, real-world learning and great fun. An introduction to adulthood with training wheels—while simultaneously being a blur of anxiety, work, sleepless nights and existential crises. I…
As a dual-degree MD/PhD student I spent two years in the medical school doing classroom learning, now I’m in the lab trying to get a PhD, and then in a few years I’ll return for the last two years of medical school and work in the hospital. In this process, I’ve heard a lot about…
After ten years of postdoctoral research there is one important piece of advice I would give to anyone embarking on a research career: Spend as much time managing your data as you do generating it Take time at the beginning of each project to organize how you will record what you are doing day-to-day. The…
PhDs have been known for their nightmarish effects on students’ psychological wellbeing, to the point that the acronym PhD has also been dubbed ‘Permanent Head Damage’, ‘Philosophically Disturbed’ or ‘Please Help. Desperate’. Doing a PhD is an emotionally exhausting experience rather than being physically challenging. Here are some tips on how to survive the PhD…
RNA sequencing (Wang 2009) is rapidly replacing gene expression microarrays in many labs. RNA-seq lets you quantify, discover and profile RNAs. For this technique, mRNA (and other RNAs) are first converted to cDNA. The cDNA is then used as the input for a next-generation sequencing library preparation. In this article, I’ll give a brief…
As a protein biochemist where bacteria were mere workhorses, imagine my surprise when I began work in a bonafide micro lab! I discovered that bacteria could be much fussier than my good ol’ cloning and expression friends E. coli DH5ɑ or BL21. One broth would not do for all, some even required blood! No, no,…
Few things can dash your hopes quite like phages. They can annihilate whole bacteria cultures in the blink of an eye, and make your next cloning or expression project impossible. But you can harness these evil-do-ers for good. And use phages to screen massive libraries of peptides. Learn how below. The Typical “Evil” Phage Experience…
Flow cytometry is a fluorescence-based technology, as is fluorescence microscopy and confocal microscopy. Fluorescence is fundamental to how a cytometer gathers data, but I am often surprised, as a core manager, at how little new users know about the process of fluorescence. So, this is where I always start the training process. Let’s get physical…
A busy research lab can be a challenging place to work for a variety of reasons. Science is a high pressure environment, often with looming grant or research paper deadlines, troublesome reagents, and experimental failure. Combined, these factors can cause many kinds of strife in the workplace, here are a few examples and some of my top tips for dealing with them!
If, like many people, you use fluorescent proteins to view your transfection efficiency or your CRISPR gene editing, you can also isolate cells with different expression levels of fluorescent proteins. Here are 5 ways to improve your sorting experiment.
Most eukaryotic proteins exist as several isoforms, differing in posttranslational modifications, which allows them to perform slightly different functions or the same function under slightly different conditions. A common posttranslational modification of proteins is glycosylation.
At a conference, a poster can be a great tool for drawing people into conversation. Not only do you have something to break the ice with, you can also get really useful feedback from a completely different perspective! To make sure you get the most out of your poster time it’s important to have a…
When it comes to registering the signal output of your Southern/Northern/Western/probe hybridization, you are spoilt for choice these days. You can go all retro and use X-ray film. You can go digital and use a phosphorimager. Finally, you can go fluorescent and use a fluorescence detector. So, what are the pros and cons of each…
Recently, I have witnessed the uprising of various next generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and it’s quite interesting because each platform uses a different method. Previously, I’ve written about the exciting possibility of nanopore sequencing—a new sequencing technology based on the “signature” electrical currents generated as a single strand of DNA passes through the nanopore. The…
So it’s time to write up your thesis. By now, you probably consider yourself an expert on your topic or you hate the sight of it (or both!). Either way, hundreds of typewritten pages are all that stands between you and graduation/freedom. One of your first requirements will be to review the current knowledge on…
Mammalian cell culture techniques are not simple, and culturing the cells requires a lot of maintenance as well as patience. In addition, doubling times compared to bacterial cells can take days instead of hours, which is most evident when contamination occurs. However, implementing small-scale hollow fiber bioreactors for culturing mammalian cells can save a lot…
When I began a master’s program in 2008, the lab task I hated more than anything was running agarose gels for DNA. Something so simple, ubiquitous, and necessary gobbled up more hours in the lab than I care to remember. Even though we added the DNA stain directly to the molten agarose and didn’t have…
When restrictions come in the form of paperwork and approvals, we detest them. Whereas, when the restrictions come in the form of enzymes, we love them, don’t we? Restriction enzymes play a key role in biotechnology research. Read ahead for six useful facts about restriction enzymes. 1. Restriction enzymes are helpful to bacteria Restriction enzymes…
Want to save money on one of the most expensive steps of your Western blots? Then, use less antibody for significant cost savings!
There are many kinds of supervisors out there, ranging from the amazingly laid back to the crazy micromanagers. There are various strategies for dealing with all of them, but what do you do when your boss is a bully?
Welcome to the magical world of systematics! Looking for a way to produce a phylogenetic tree that’s a step above the default options, time efficient, not too program heavy and avoids using command line programs? Although there are more rigorous analyses that strict systematists perform, for your purposes, the following should suffice. 1. Data selection…
Size selection is a critical step in NGS pipelines, but may be most challenging for studies of small RNAs. The concept behind size selection is simple: separate a sheared DNA or cDNA sample by fragment size, and then use the resulting sizes to remove unwanted fragments. This is a tried-and-true way to get rid of…
In the previous installment of this series on western blotting, we addressed potential sources of error when your final product is completely bare. But alternatively, what do you do when too much background is the problem? You may have beautiful bands of interest—but if there is a bunch of non-specific binding, your quantification and data…
In Part 1 of these articles, you’ll have learnt about common microscope light sources and how to replace and align these correctly. In this article, we will discuss the importance of Köhler illumination and how to set up the microscope to achieve optimal imaging results. What is Köhler illumination? Before discussing this technique, let us…
Do you want the best imaging experience each time you use a microscope? Well, this is a rhetorical question, as we all desire that these delicate optical instruments are clean, free from immersion oil and correctly aligned. From the routine checking of slides, capturing images for presentations and publications, to diagnosing diseases using point-of-care microscopes,…
It took scientists a little while to warm up to long-read sequencing, but now you couldn’t pry most of them away from their sequencers with a crowbar. Long reads — we’re talking 10,000 bases and more — provide a level of contiguity and completeness in genome assemblies that simply isn’t possible with short-read sequencers. They…
The age of sequencing is undoubtedly upon us. From improving cancer diagnostics to pinning down elephant poaching hotspots, DNA sequencing is revolutionizing the world around us from the ground up. The latest video from Thermo Fisher Scientific’s “Behind the Bench” blog, 10 moments in DNA sequencing gives fascinating insights into the amazing advances being made…
Of all the sample prep steps necessary for next generation sequencing, DNA size selection may have the greatest impact on quality of results. After all, ineffective sizing can waste sequencing capacity on low molecular weight material such as adapter-dimers or primer-dimers, while imprecise sizing can prevent bioinformaticians from producing accurate assemblies. High-quality size selection can…
Given enough time, even the worst rookie research disasters seem amusing. It’s a comedy of errors that test our wit and our patience, but ultimately leave a lifelong impression on how to try experimentation a little bit differently the second time around. With that said, here are 5 brief stories of amusing things I’ve witnessed…
Do you want to know more about the story behind some of today’s big developments in sequencing technology? Illumina recently started a video series called “Adventures in Genomics” that introduces the people working on methods and applications, making big waves in our understanding of science, biology, and medicine. The company’s most recent video covers single-cell…
Western Blotting is a long established method for which the protocol varies little from lab to lab. However, there are kits available and some tweaks that can be made to the protocols that may improve your results and reduce the time it takes you to execute this popular technique. Save Time by Co-Incubating the Primary…
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