Join Us
Sign up for our feature-packed newsletter today to ensure you get the latest expert help and advice to level up your lab work.
Looking for a new direction in your career? This is the latest in our new series of articles that focus on careers for scientists. When we started this series, we thought you’d be interested in finding out about who does what behind the scenes at Bitesize Bio, and how we got here. I interviewed our…
A partial digest – typically done when you only want to cut one of two or more restriction sites in a DNA – can be a frustrating procedure to execute. The best advice anybody can give about partial digests is to avoid having to do them. However, there are times when there just aren’t many…
Western blotting is a common lab technique used to detect and analyze proteins. It also happens to be a really long and complicated procedure, with many steps along the way that are easy to mess up. How do you make sure that your Western blot is successful? Avoid the following five ways to destroy your…
We’ve had some great feedback about this column lately. I hope you enjoy today’s interview as much as you seem to have liked the first couple we’ve covered. There’s more coming soon, looking at scientists who made the move into areas like Marketing, Regulatory Affairs, University Teaching and lots more in the pipeline. Today, we’ve…
Recently I had the opportunity to help a job seeker prepare to interview for their dream job. They successfully navigated through rigorous phone interviews and secured the make-it or break-it face-to-face interview. The candidate and I discussed all of the preparation, research and pre-work necessary to ensure a successful interview. Dress to impress When I recommended…
In Part 1 of this series, we began our journey into the fascinating world of enzymology. We looked at the most basic concepts of what an enzyme is and the incredible jobs it can do. In Part 2 of “Working with Enzymes,” I will look at some things that you should keep in mind to…
Understanding how to format your manuscript is an important skill for researchers and getting it right will make your PI very happy – they’ll spend less time proofreading and editing the document for you and it might just help get your manuscript through to peer review faster. When writing up your results for a…
Many PhD students conducting their research are not aware of the fact that conducting autonomous research is project management. This assumption is realized by most students only after graduation or in the last year of their studies (a webinar discussing project management will be held this coming May). Because being a technician and a project…
As scientists, we become engrossed in our own scientific world. We focus on graduating, publishing a paper, or writing that grant application. Our labs, quite literally, become our world. Which is why we all know the glazed looks in the eyes of non-scientific people who had the misfortune of asking us what we do. As…
In parts one and two of this series I described how semi-permeable membranes and precipitation methods could be used to concentrate your protein-of-interest, but there is one more method that you may not have thought of for protein concentration – chromatography. While chromatography resins are an obvious choice for protein purification, they can also be…
While precipitation is an obvious choice for concentrating DNA and RNA samples, it can also be an effective way to concentrate proteins. Here in installment two of this three part series, I describe the two most common methods for protein precipitation – ammonium sulfate and trichloroacetic acid. Background Precipitation of proteins occurs primarily by hydrophobic…
This is the first of a three part series describing some of the most common methods for concentrating proteins. In later installments I’ll discuss using protein precipitation and chromatography to concentrate a protein. However, here I’ll detail the most popular approach – semi-permeable membranes, used for both dialysis and commercial protein concentrators. Structure of the…
Protein kinases and protein phosphatases phosphorylate and dephosphorylate a plethora of proteins. They are responsible for regulating the majority of cellular activities. Because of their importance, they can seem intimidating to tackle as a research project. At the end of the day however, kinases and phosphatases are- simply put- enzymes. Therefore, you can standard enzyme…
So my PhD hasn’t been easy but whose has? And if it wasn’t for some supportive colleagues and some great advice I wouldn’t be where I am today, or where I was last year! I found out about a great conference from a colleague, and their enthusiasm got me really interested when all I wanted…
You’ve done the experiments, gathered the data, interpreted the results, and now you’ve got something important to share with the scientific community. Congratulations! You’re writing a scientific paper. Once you’ve decided on which journal to submit your paper, you can get the guidelines from that journal. All that’s left is to write the paper. Your…
Looking for a new direction in your career? Well you’ve come to the right place. This is the first in our new series of articles that focus on careers for scientists. We’ll be looking at jobs that are off-the-beaten-track (and sometimes on no track at all) and ones that are certainly not on the standard…
If you purify proteins expressed in E. coli, then you’re probably familiar with this scenario: you come in bright and early in the morning and inoculate your large flasks of media with the overnight culture, start shaking them at 37 °C, and now you wait. And watch. And wait some more. You can’t venture far,…
I learned most of my molecular biology skills in the first lab I worked in almost 10 years ago. I realized recently that I was in desperate need of a refresher course, so I did a little bit of reading to see if I could improve the efficiency of my cloning reactions. In the process,…
Suddenly it’s time up, write up, and make room for the next batch of PhD students in the lab – so how do you find that first job? OK – so now you’re finishing your PhD or graduated already, and it’s time to look for that first job. Maybe you’ve already started endless hours of…
Chris Dieni wraps up his series on the Basics of Protein Phosphorylation with this final part on further reading and resources available.
Chris Dieni explores the promiscuous yet intriguing nature of protein phosphatases
I write regularly about topics related to electronic lab notebooks over on The electronic lab notebook blog. Nick thought it might be interesting for me to do an occasional post on electronic lab notebooks for Bitesize Bio, so here goes! I thought I’d start with a comparison of electronic lab notebooks with wikis and Google…
Coffee is powerful stuff, but did you ever think of using it for….
CIP has been around for a while, but there is a better alternative.
Using UNG is a great trick for PCR amplicon decontamination, but is it any good for rtPCR?
Diving deeper into protein kinases, explore the vast realm of known kinases, their amino acid targets, and the intricate process of target selection.
Research is a challenging field that demands a tremendous amount of skill and dedication. We are required to be creative but logical, independent but team players, innovative but grounded, proliferative but focused. This balancing act requires not only a very broad set of skills and talents, but also the ability to manage it all with…
If you regularly grow up the same bacterial culture, whether it’s the strain that expresses your favorite protein, the culture you make your competent cells from, or just your regular control strain, it can be a bit of a pain growing it up from scratch each time. Before you even get to grow your actual…
In the previous article in this series, we looked at the major players involved in protein phosphorylation: protein kinases, protein phosphatases, and target proteins. This time, we’ll glance over some of the tools that we can use to study various aspects of protein phosphorylation, focussing on a few I’ve personally come across. 1. Tools for…
This is the final installment in a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here, for the second part, click here, and for the third, click here. After what has potentially (likely?) been years of data collection and a month or two of writing, re-writing, wailing and gnashing of teeth,…
This is part three of a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here, for the second part, click here. Once you have written the first draft and handed it off to your mentor, the editing process begins. Depending on the personalities involved, this could be a…
The decision to make the switch from an academic lab and career to a biotech company doesn’t come easy. Many scientists are wary of the lack of independence and doing science for profit. But there are advantages too. Working in a biotech lab allows you to work on many varied and interesting projects that actually come to…
This is part two of a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here. You have been pounding away at your project, probably for a year… or two… or three… Anyhow, you now have a collection of figures that seem to tell quite a nice story,…
Most of us learn the art of writing papers on the job, often a painful process. In this four-part series, I’ll run you through my step-by-step approach to writing papers and, hopefully, help make the process of writing your first (or next) paper, a bit easier. As always, if you have any alternative advice or…
When I was in graduate school, it seemed that almost no one aspired to work in industry or be part of a company. But times are changing. Now, when I go to conferences and talk to scientists in training, I am asked, “how do I get a job in a company?” and “How did you get…
Microcentrifuges are pretty much the epitome of efficiency, but I have a couple of suggestions that may make using this instrument even easier. Divide by ThreeNot only is the number of tubes a microcentrifuge can hold divisible by two, but almost always by three as well. How does this help you? If you have an…
Primer design can sometimes feel like more of an art than a science, and designing the best primer can significantly affect the success or failure of your experiments. Here are a few tips on optimizing primer design for several different applications: PCR amplification/cloning One of the most common primer-based applications is cloning. The desired amplicon…
After picking a graduate program, the next big decision for a first-year graduate student is picking an advisor. One of the factors to consider in this decision is the academic age of the Professor and his or her lab. Do you want to work for the energetic Assistant Professor that joined the department last year,…
Have a healthy respect for the ultra! Here are some hints and tips for using a preparative ultracentrifuge, disaster free.
The focus of my grad studies and postdoctoral research has been the analysis of proteins regulated by reversible protein phosphorylation. However, the number of unique facets in which protein phosphorylation can be studied is astounding, and is diverse as any niche of the biosciences. This article is the first in a series that will give…
The eBook with top tips from our Researcher community.