Adrienne Huntress
Adrienne is an aspiring science raconteuse. When she's not improving the stability of microbes, she participates in outreach and education events. Her goals include bringing science to rural areas and creating a sustainable homestead.
Articles by Adrienne Huntress:
Picking the Right DNA Isolation Kit for Your Application
If you plan to work with purified DNA in the lab, it’s likely that you will use a commercial DNA extraction kit to isolate and purify your DNA of interest. With so many types of kits available, it can be a major challenge to choose the best one to use when working with an unfamiliar…
How to Eliminate 99% of the Water from Your Culture, or Solid State Fermentation
When you think about culturing bacteria or fungi in large quantities, you likely envision flasks shaking or maybe bioreactors filled to the brim with liquid media. But did you know that many bacteria and fungi can grow on solid carriers without being submerged in liquid? Enter solid state fermentation (SSF). In this article, I’ll introduce…
Four Free and Easy-To-Use Online Primer Design Tools
Designing and running PCR reactions in the lab has become so commonplace that the number of primer design tools available can be a bit overwhelming for a beginner (or even an experienced molecular biologist!). Below are four of my favorite online programs available to make primer design quick, easy, and effective. A quick note before…
Is Your Bacterial Culture Still Growing? A Primer on OD600 Measurements
This article is for anyone who has ever wondered, “How do I know when my bacterial culture is ‘done’ growing? When should I harvest my cells?” Bacterial Growth Curves Review Let’s start by reviewing the 4 basic phases of a bacterial growth curve: log phase, lag phase, stationary phase, and death phase (Figure 1). A…
Meet Nature’s Oldest Doomsday Preppers: Endospores
My favorite reason for being a biologist is that I am endlessly amazed by how life adapts to various pressures on planet Earth. This especially holds true for endospores, one of nature’s most resilient means of surviving for thousands of years in non-ideal environmental conditions. In this article, we’ll explore some of the extreme environments…