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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.
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…
What is HRM Analysis? It is now more than a decade since the introduction of melting analysis to characterize PCR products. Melting analysis following SYBR green-based real-time PCR has become a mainstay in research laboratories worldwide for applications such as gene expression because of it’s ease of design and cost-effectiveness (i.e. no need for expensive labeled probes)….
We recently featured an article about how to streamline your cloning. But what about those days when you have too much on your plate, and need to put some things off until later? Here are a few hints on where you can pause in your cloning experiments while working on other projects: We sent a…
Northern and Southern blotting are now a thing of the past. They’ve been replaced with a faster and more quantitative technique. No longer do we wait days to know whether a gene is expressed. We can have the answer in 45 minutes! Real-time PCR is now commonly employed in almost all molecular biology laboratories to…
While almost all of you are probably familiar with the power of eBay to bring you everything from concert tickets to electronics to your very own Batmobile, you may not have realized that the world’s largest garage sale also has quite a collection of laboratory equipment. I’ve been turning to this source for equipment for…
While reading my back issues of Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM), I came across an interesting paper that detailed an in-depth study on the effectiveness of hand cleaners to remove Norwalk virus (NV) from intentionally contaminated hands. Yes that’s right – intentionally contaminated, and how. The study volunteers allowed a 20% stool suspension containing Norwalk virus to be…
Graduate school (PhD training) is full of roadblocks and obstacles that threaten to hinder progress, but your major professor (PI) should not be one of them. If you are frustrated with your progress and your lab environment has become unbearable, don’t throw in the towel just yet! You may need to change labs. Finding the…
Do you ever take a look at what you’re doing in the lab and think, “Wow, this would really come in handy at home?” Here are a few of the things I use in the lab that I would love to have in my kitchen: 1. Stir plates and stir bars would be incredibly useful…
Reading papers on-screen is not something that everyone likes but if you can get used to it, it will help save you time and paper and make filing your literature a breeze. If you use a wide flatscreen monitor, something that is 17inch or bigger, then this tip could make your on-screen reading more pleasurable….
One of the very first things you need to do when getting set up for quantitative PCR (qPCR) is to determine the efficiency of the assay because knowing the assay efficiency is critical to accurate data interpretation. Here’s how.
I always keep an ear open for helpful tips in the lab – those little tricks that can make your experiments faster, easier and better. Here are a few tricks I’ve picked up for trimming down the time it takes to do your cloning: Restriction digestsMany digests are complete within 10 minutes of digestion at…
PCR is highly sensitive, but the downside of that very property is that it makes the technique prone to producing false-positives. In labs where PCR is a staple, like the one I work in, any false-positives are more often than not due to amplicon contamination. A broken capillary or a PCR plate left carelessly at…
The release of the iPad this week may bring the long-expected replacement of the paper-bound lab notebook by electronic notebooks one step closer. But are scientists, particularly PIs, comfortable with electronic lab notebooks? The rise of the tabletsThe concept of an electronic lab notebook isn’t anything new, and even the idea of implementing it on…
In an ideal world, every PI would be a nurturing and challenging mentor who carefully guides your project and is invested in developing your skills as a scientist. In the real world, however, that kind of leadership can be hard to find. In any case, one of the most important and useful mental steps you…
A recent article published by The Scientist called Power Couples gave advice and examples for scientist couples who have successfully balanced their life at home and in the lab. It was interesting from the perspective of how two very busy and career motivated people work together to have it all: raise a family, run a lab, and stay in love…
If you have ever attempted to load a SDS-PAGE gel only to miss the well, stab the divider, and then watch helplessly as your sample squirts off into the wrong well, then this tip is for you. The fortunate among us are able to use pre-cast gels with the wells outlined on the gel plate,…
Find out how to build a plate centrifuge using a salad spinner. Gathering the components is as complicated as it gets!
We received the following question from Bitesize Bio reader, Beheroze Sattha. It relates to a problem with absolute quantification using plasmids for standard curves. Since many people use this technique it is an interesting one question for us to explore, and it also gives us a great opportunity to cover some important tips for performing…
Presenting your work is a fantastic opportunity to get feedback on your project, demonstrate the significance of your results, and make the connections that will enhance your future career. And yet, how many incomprehensible lab meetings have we all sat through? How many seminars have you attended that left you feeling more confused than inspired?…
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