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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.
The very idea of standing up and giving an oral presentation at a conference gives even the most confident of us butterflies. Additionally, I don’t know many scientists who find the thought of spending hours working on a powerpoint presentation exactly thrilling. However, there are many benefits to presenting your work at a conference. First…
After having discussed what epigenetic mechanisms are and how we’ve learnt about what they do, it is now time to look into how epigenetics affect our lives if things do not go the way they are supposed to go. I hope I have convinced you that epigenetic processes are vital for an organism, in development…
Epigenetics is the most rapidly expanding field in biology. In the second article in this series, I discussed which experimental techniques have been crucial in gaining insight into epigenetic processes. I will now shed light on what those and other methods have taught us. As described in the first article, it has been long understood…
In the past decade, important advances have been made in the field of epigenetics. Obviously, unraveling epigenetic mechanisms has been greatly facilitated by technological developments. I’ll try to give you an impression of the types of experiments that have helped fuel those new and exciting insights. Yevgeniy Grigoryev has recently written an article on DNA…
These days, epigenetics is a fast moving field. I don’t remember having learnt about it during my biomedical studies, some 10 years ago. Nowadays, there seems to be no way around it when studying health and disease. Increasing interest combined with recent technological breakthroughs have led to quickly expanding knowledge of its abundant and important…
I first read “The Golem: What You Should Know about Science” as an undergraduate student for an introduction to the sociology of scientific knowledge. I feel it’s an important book for anyone who wants to understand how science works. Ten years later, I still find myself revisiting it. Read on to find out why… In…
A young laboratory technician was puzzled by his plates when he pulled them out of the warm room. They never looked that cloudy and fuzzy before. He brought them to his lab director, who shook her head sadly; together, they threw the plates away. Does this story sound familiar? What probably happened was an all-too…
Mycoplasma infections are very, very bad news; these special prokaryotes can rapidly spread through your cell culture and inhibit cell proliferation, induce apoptosis, cytokines and radicals, and otherwise transform your cells. Worst of all, since contamination is not easy to spot, you may not realize your culture is contaminated until it’s too late. The 100…
How often have you torn apart the lab looking for the reagent you need right now for some thawing samples? That reagent which you (possibly) ordered a week ago and which (maybe) came in yesterday? If your answer isn’t “just once in my entire career,” please read on! I will outline four steps to setup…
Commercial kits for isolation of large quantities of plasmid DNA generally rely on standard alkaline lysis followed by an affinity chromatography column-based method to purify DNA. Compared to traditional cesium chloride banding or PEG precipitation of plasmid DNA they are a breeze, and have the added benefit of avoiding use of toxic or hazardous chemicals…
Western blots may be great for visualizing protein expression, but they can be a perfect way to waste your precious antibody stocks if you follow the normal protocol. Thankfully, you don’t have to follow the normal protocol any more; here’s how to get great blots with a fraction of the antibody usage. I have tried…
It’s pretty likely you’ll have heard of impact factors, either through colleagues talking about them in the lab, or from a journal homepage advertising its latest score. Whilst impact factor is a relatively artificial value, it is something that journal editors, scientists and some funding agencies take seriously. It’s therefore important to understand what it…
Graduate programs in science can take an additional four to seven years beyond a Bachelor’s degree. That’s a lot of time to commit to advanced training! If you’re currently a high school or college student wondering if graduate school is the right path for you, perhaps an internship in a laboratory can help you decide….
You’ve masterfully run and transferred your gel, and now it’s time to probe and quantify your protein(s). You’ve got your antibodies and ECL ready to go. Substrate – check. Film cartridge – check. Darkroom – ah yes, that magical place where night vision goggles are required to navigate a veritable minefield of potential chaos. It…
Following closely on the heels of Cristy’s article “How to Clean a Waterbath”, I’d like to take a moment to rant about a few other hated (and carefully avoided) lab tasks. Here are my top ten LEAST favorite things to do in the lab: What’s YOUR most hated lab task?
Poster sessions can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare; it all comes down to how well you’ve prepared. In this article, I’ll discuss how to present your data in poster form, what to look out for at a poster session, and how to make the most out of a poster session…in short, how…
Here’s a quick guide to cleaning and maintenance, to help you overcome your fears of the monsters lurking in your water bath.
Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in the phenotype of a cell or an organism that are not encoded by the genome (hence epi which means ‘above’ in Greek, and genetikos which means ‘origin’). In this article, we’ll discuss DNA methylation, a common epigenetic modification: what it is, how to detect it, and how…
Everybody is different when it comes to how they like to run their work space. Some people just find a space in the lab and work wherever there’s room, sharing their tips and pipettes, while others like to have a designated area to do their lab work in, with their own equipment. Personally, I much…
There are six little words that can instill both excitement and trepidation in the heart of a graduate student: “No one’s ever done this before.” What those words really mean, of course, is “No one’s ever published this before,” and you are either standing at the edge of a great discovery or a chasm of…
When running a quantitative Western blot, it’s crucial that your sample preparation is consistent. Incomplete protein extraction from one sample will skew your results when you compare it to the protein content of a sample that was extracted more thoroughly. And after the protein extraction, it’s important to handle the samples in an identical manner…
Working with RNA? What fun! Those little, nearly indestructible RNases are everywhere – on your skin and mucous membranes, in the water and (some of the) enzymes you use, on lab surfaces, even in airborne microbes! Here are 10 ways to keep the RNases at bay, and keep your precious samples safe:
When it comes to choosing a molecular weight marker to run on your SDS-PGE gels, there are a lot of options out there. How do you know which one is right for you? Read on for tips on what to consider when choosing a standard for your protein gels. Before you go about selecting a…
In today’s technology-driven world, we leave so many things to our electronic gadgets. Surprisingly, many life scientists try manically to control the appearance of their documents by hand with programs like MS Word. LaTeX takes this task off your hands by providing highly efficient algorithms to properly format your texts. The results are almost always…
So, you’ve done your experiment, prepped your samples, and run your SDS-PAGE gel. Now it’s time for the all-important transfer step, that tricky point that will determine the quality of your Western blot. Transfer times are empirical and based on your own particular samples, which means that there is no easy way to determine how…
The easiest way to keep abreast of what’s going on in your scientific field is to set up a PubMed alert. We show you how.
I think that transferring Western blots is one the most enjoyable tasks to do in a lab: it’s quick, it’s messy, and on some gleeful level, it feels like a child’s art project gone wrong. Of course, it’s also finicky and slippery and prone to tiny pitfalls that can noticeably affect the quality of your…
For Western blot data to be reliable, it is important that you load known amounts of sample into each lane of the gel. This is of particular importance if you are doing a quantitative blot, where you really need to be able to compare band intensity in each sample. In this article, we’ll talk about…
You have just finished your undergraduate studies, or perhaps you have been working in the field for a while, you are full of energy and zest and you want to prove to the world that you are carved from the right stone to pursue PhD studies. Going to graduate school is a very important, potentially…
While Luria-Bertani broth (LB) has long been the fuel that powered Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, there is an increasing movement towards more specialized and complex bacterial media formulations such as Terrific Broth (TB), Plasmid DNA Media (PDMR), and Autoinduction Media (ZYP-5052). These media formulations optimize E. coli cell growth and performance utilizing specialized carbon sources…
I recently introduced you to the concept of polarising microscopy. Naturally, if evaluating refractile material is an everyday part of your research, it is definitely worth investing in a professional polariser modification for your microscope. But if you only use a polariser occasionally, this might not be the best use of your lab’s money. In…
Tandem affinity purification is a development of existing techniques for purifying protein complexes from cells in physiological conditions. It was first described over ten years ago and has become a commonplace laboratory tool. In this brief article I’ll introduce the basic technique and describe some of its advantages. Biology is a team game. Most biological…
When you stop to think about it, tissue slices for immunohistochemistry (IHC) undergo quite a lot of handling. From chemical reactions to washes – even manipulations and transfers between baskets and microtubes – final analysis is often hours away from the initial step of taking a tissue slice. Properly fixed tissue has to be robust…
Polarising microscopy involves the use of polarised light to investigate the optical properties of various specimens. Although originally used predominantly in the field of geology, it has recently become more widely used in medical and biological research fields too. Polarising light microscopy is a contrast-enhancing technique to allow you to evaluate the composition and three-dimensional…
Against the advice of journals and printers, many scientists use Microsoft Powerpoint to assemble posters and figures. You should consider upgrading to Adobe Illustrator! For generating scientific figures, Illustrator is more powerful and flexible than Powerpoint and is designed to produce print documents at high quality resolution. This means that journals will stop sending your…
There’s more to mammalian cell culture than just making sure that your cells don’t die. It is a lot like taking care of children. You have to feed them, make sure that they’re growing well, and keep them under constant supervision. If the cells are put through extreme conditions (over-confluency, media-deprivation, inaccurate temps, etc.), their…
Do you use human cell lines in your research? Well, keep reading because this may be the most important article you will ever read in your research career. It is estimated that 18-36% of all actively growing cell line cultures are misidentified and/or cross-contaminated with another cell line (1). For researchers, this could mean that…
Collecting the data took several years, writing the paper took several months, assembling the figures took several weeks, and converting those figures to PDFs took a frustratingly long day. You waited a month for the paper to come back from review, then two months re-doing experiments to satisfy a sadistic reviewer. Finally, your paper is…
To pull together our discussions so far on hypothesis testing and p-values, we will use the t distribution as an example to see how it all works. The t distribution (you may have heard it called Student’s t) is a probability distribution that looks like a bell-shaped curve (or normal distribution). If we sample repeatedly from…
Now we come to the third part of our trifecta; in the last two posts I have gone over p-values and how they determine significance in null hypothesis testing, and we talked about degrees of freedom and their effect on the p-value. Finally, we come to pseudoreplication: where it can all go terribly wrong. Replication…
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